Google Chrome has had the ability to link forward to specific on-page text since the company released its “Link to Text Fragment” extension. Now, the company is integrating the feature directly into Chrome itself. That’s based on a recently-discovered flag setting, reported by TechDows. The experimental feature effectively places the capability behind a right-click action.
In effect, that means that users can simply right-click, select “copy link to text” and then send the copied link. When receiving parties open the link, it doesn’t just take them to a specific page. It takes them right to the text that was selected and highlights it.
For example, a user might navigate to a review for a smartphone on Android Headlines. That review might note that the camera on the phone is great. And that might be interesting to the reader but that particular segment might also be buried further down the page than is useful. So a reader could create a link to the text about the camera instead of just linking to the article.
Link to Text Fragment features may not arrive soon at all
Now, this feature was first introduced some time back as something users could manually create. Later on, as recently as June, the company made an extension available to accomplish the task more easily. But integration with Chrome at the software level takes things much further. Instead of being an option users will need to look for and add-in, it’ll just be a standard available feature.
None of that is to say it will arrive quickly though. It took nearly 4 months for the feature to go from an extension to a built-in tool, to begin with. And it’s still in the Canary Channel for now.
For clarity, the Canary Channel in Chrome is the nightly-build, buggy experimental version of the app and software. Above it is the Dev Channel and Beta Channel, both of which are less buggy but still fairly buggy. And then the Stable Channel of Chrome almost everybody uses.
Making matters worse, the Link to Text Fragment feature isn’t available out-of-the-box just yet either. It requires an additional experimental setting to be activated over at the “chrome://flags” URL. It also doesn’t work for Android just yet.
How do you turn this on if you are on Chrome Canary?
Turning the feature on, for those that are using Chrome Canary, is straightforward.
- Navigate to chrome://flags
- Search for “Copy link to Text”
- Switch the Copy Link To Text flag from “Default” to “Enabled”
- Restart Chrome when prompted
- Select and right-click text to be linked
- Send or use the copied link