The Disorienting Jump
Google Chrome supports a web standard called “Scroll to Text Fragment.” This allows users to share a special URL that not only points to a specific webpage but also highlights a specific sentence and automatically scrolls the page down to that exact location upon loading. The URLs contain a hash fragment formatted like `#:~:text=specific_words`. While this is excellent for pointing a colleague directly to a relevant paragraph in a massive Wikipedia article, it can be disorienting if you prefer to read a page from the top down, or if you click a link and find yourself instantly teleported past the introduction and context of the article.
Disabling Text Fragment Scrolling
To maintain control over your reading experience and stop Google Chrome from automatically scrolling to highlighted text fragments when clicking specialized links, you must disable the feature using Chrome’s experimental flags.
This setting is not available in the standard user interface; it resides in the advanced flags menu. Open Google Chrome and type chrome://flags into the address bar, then press Enter. You will see a page with a search box at the top. In this search box, type Scroll to Text Fragment. The list will filter down to show the corresponding experimental feature. Click the dropdown menu next to it (which is likely set to “Default”) and change it to Disabled. Chrome will immediately prompt you to restart the browser to apply the change. Click the blue Relaunch button at the bottom of the screen. Going forward, if someone sends you a link with a text fragment hash, Chrome will simply load the page at the very top, ignoring the automatic scroll command entirely.