A few days ago, version 80 of the popular web browser Google Chrome was officially released. Like with every new version, Google included many features and improvements which we highlighted in detail in this article. In addition to these features, a new and wonderful feature was introduced, but it is not activated by default. The feature is called “Scroll to text fragment,” and we will delve into its details in this article to understand its benefits and how to use it.
When browsing some web pages or articles and you find a paragraph or important text that you want to share with a friend, you would typically copy the page link and send it to them through email or social media. However, you would either have to verbally inform them about the paragraph or text you want them to read, or your friend would have to read through the entire page to reach that specific text, especially in long articles.
Read: What does the WebXR technology announced by Google for Chrome support mean?
However, with the “Scroll to text fragment” feature, you can create a specific link for that page and send it to your friends. When your friend opens that link in Chrome, they will be directed straight to the paragraph containing that text, and the text will be highlighted in yellow to draw attention that this is the text you want them to focus on without the need to read through less important paragraphs.
As mentioned earlier, this feature is not enabled by default. After updating to the latest version of Chrome, you will need to go to the Experimental Flags page and enable the feature to “Enabled” using the following link:
chrome://flags/#enable-text-fragment-anchor
You will need to restart the browser by clicking the “Relaunch” option at the bottom of the screen after activation.
Now, after enabling the feature, when browsing a web page and wanting to use the feature, all you need to do is copy the text you want to focus on and directly go to it. Then, navigate to the page link in the address bar and add the following characters at the end of the current link:
#:~:text=
Then paste the text you copied from the page after the (=) sign. You can use any text, even Arabic texts. After pasting the text, copy the entire link from the beginning to the end (with the pasted text) and send it to your friends or even paste it in a new tab. When opening that link, you will find that the browser has directed straight to the specific paragraph with the selected text highlighted in yellow.
Read also: How to save all open tabs in Google Chrome
It should be noted that the feature may not work on some websites yet without a clear reason. However, as evident in this article, the feature works normally as it has been tested on the famous “Wikipedia” website. Undoubtedly, it is a fantastic feature still in the experimental stages, and it will surely be further developed to work on all websites and also improve the ease of use in the future.
