Currently, users can only link to full webpages, like this link here to a Microsoft Edge article. While this serves a purpose, adding specific linking to Chromium browsers will expand text anchoring. ChromeStory discovered a commit that points to a feature called Scroll to Text. Available as a GitHub project, not much information is known about what the feature will deliver. The developers point out how they plan to implement Scroll to Text on Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome. “We propose encoding a text snippet in the URL fragment, prefixed with the targetText= string. Since text can contain characters invalid in a URL (e.g. spaces), the text must be percent encoded. For example, #targetText=My%20Heading would cause the first occurance of “My Heading” on the page to be selected as the indicated part of the document.” It seems this feature is still some way off. It is not part of the Google Chrome Canary testing browser. However, we think it will probably be officially discussed soon and could come to Chromium browsers later in the year.
Edge on Chromium
Last year, Microsoft confirmed its Edge browser is moving to Chromium-based: “Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers,” said Microsoft CVP Joe Belfiore. One of the benefits of switching to Chromium is Microsoft can address limited functionality by supporting Chrome extensions. By adopting Chromium, all those Chrome extensions are now available on Microsoft Edge. It is worth noting that while Microsoft confirmed functionality with extensions is likely, it is not finalized yet.
