Summary
Mozilla Firefox is one of the few browsers that doesnotuse Chromium as its browser engine, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t occasionally take a page from Chrome, especially when it’s a useful feature. Now, it’s getting easier to link to things from Firefox, just like it currently is from Chrome.
Firefox is trying out a new feature that will allow you to create Text Fragment links. This functionality, long available in Chromium-based browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, lets you generate a unique URL that scrolls directly to and highlights a specific snippet of text on any webpage—this lets you hop directly to a specific part within a website without having to rely on subheaders to do so. Previously, while Firefox supported navigating to these specialized links, creating them was not a built-in browser function. Now, Nightly users can simply highlight a portion of text, right-click, and select an option from the context menu to generate a shareable link.
This new capability directly mirrors the “Copy link to highlight” feature found in Chromium-based browsers, and lets you quickly generate one of these links by just right-clicking and selecting the appropriate option. The way this works is that the browser appends a directive to the URL’s hash when it’s copying the URL. This directive is formatted as “#:~:text=…” and instructs the browser on which text to find and highlight upon loading the page. For example, a link might look a bit like “https://example.com/page#:~:text=start_of_quote,end_of_quote". This way, you can quickly highlight any specific text within an article, and it’s specifically useful for things like Wikipedia articles or other types of especially long text websites where there might not be subheaders or you still need to look a bit under a subheader. Google searches use this a lot to reference specific text snippets within search results.
You could technically always type out these directives after a link yourself since it’s nothing too complex, or you could use something like a bookmarklet or a browser extension. But the fact that there’s an integrated tool for it right within the browser will greatly simplify things for a lot of people.
This is a change coming to Nightly builds, so you’ll have to wait a bit for it to arrive on stable builds. Other changes in this build include a fix for the browser’s built-in migration mode, which should now allow Opera users to migrate smoothly after Opera changed its profile data storage method. There’s a lot of smaller stuff, and you can look at the entire changeloghere. I never recommend checking out Nightly builds unless you’re comfortable with stuff breaking every month, so I’d recommend you to wait until this all comes to a stable build of Firefox. It could take a few weeks or a few months.
