Scroll To Text Fragment Coming to Chrome 80

Text fragments will be available on Chrome 80. This feature allows a user or author to link to a specific portion of a page, using a text snippet provided in the URL. When the page is loaded, the browser highlights the text and scrolls it into view.

For example, the URL:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#:~:text=On islands, birds can contribute as much as 60% of a cat’s diet]

This loads the page for Cat, highlights the specified text, and scrolls directly to it.

Navigating to a URL today will load the page scrolled to the top. On pages that provide element ids on appropriate section headings, users and other pages can link directly to those elements by providing the id in the “URL hash”. For example, navigating to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat#Senses will load the page for Cat, scrolled to the “Senses” section.

However, the URL hash relies on authors annotating their page and correctly guessing all points that might be interesting to a user. This feature will allow the link-creator to specify which portion of the page is interesting, without relying on author annotations.

Search engines, which link to pages that contain content relevant to user queries, would benefit from being able to scroll users directly to the part of the page most relevant to their query. If you follow Cindy Krum you would have heard about fraggles in the past, this is just that. Google will be able to send users to specific ports on the page even without the site deep-linking to that portion of the page.