Sometimes you really want to create a link that goes to a specific part of a long web page? Well, Google Chrome 80 makes that possible with a new deep linking feature known as “Scroll To Text Fragment.” Here’s how to use Google Chrome’s new Deep-Linking Feature.
Google Chrome’s New Deep-Linking Feature
This feature does not require any special effort on the part of a website’s developer. You can easily create deep links to any web page on any website.
However, these links will only work in Google Chrome 80 for the present. Simply click menu > Help > About Google Chrome to check if you have the latest version of Chrome installed.
How to Create Links That Scroll to a Text Fragment
You have to simply visit the following link to take a look at this feature in action if you are using Google Chrome browser. After you click on this link, the Chrome browser will load our homepage. Then it will scroll down to the bottom of it and highlight the “About Us” text:
howtogeek.com/#:~:text=about%20us
We simply didn’t do anything special to enable this on our website. Google Chrome pays attention to the parameter at the end of the URL. When you load the web page, it usually scrolls to the text that matches what you’ve specified in the URL and simply highlights it.
In order to use this feature in its most basic form, visit a web page and add #:~:text=WORD to the end of the web page’s address then, replacing “WORD” with a word of your choosing. Simply use “%20” in place of a space character.
Let’s take an example that you want to create a link to the word “competitions” on the Wikipedia article about Dogs. You’d take the address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog and add #:~:text=competitions . The resulting link would be like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog#:~:text=competitions
This feature supports more complicated instructions too, rather than simply specifying a word or two. This may help users on more complicated documents. You can simply read the draft Text Fragments standards document for more technical information.
There have been some discussions about privacy concerns regarding this feature. However, it’s available in the stable release Google Chrome 80 already. Other browsers have still not signed on.