Chrome feature might let you link directly to specified text on a page

A potential new Google Chrome feature is making its way to the Canary version of the browser (via Chrome Story). The new feature will allow users to share links to specific sections of web pages, even those pages which don’t have anchor links.

Let’s say you want to send an email to someone with a reference to a piece of data within a long news article. If you wanted to point the email recipient to a particular spot on the shared page, how would you do it? Unless the information you want to share has an anchor link attached to it, there’s no easy way to share a URL that points someone to a very specific part of a page.

This new Chrome feature would solve that problem by enabling a user to highlight a section of text and then create a custom URL that points directly to that one section. The feature will be called Scroll to Text, so named because it would load the URL as usual and then scroll to a specific piece of text on that page automatically.

The code commit related to Scroll to Text just appeared, so it will be a while before it makes it to the Canary build of Google Chrome. If it has a successful run in Canary, it will make its way to the beta version of Chrome, and then, hopefully, to the stable build most of us use.

Since most people stuck in a situation where Scroll to Text would be helpful usually just take a screenshot or ask people to use CTRL-F when they arrive at a page, this will likely save a lot of headaches.

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