The Scroll-to-Text Feature
You may have noticed a relatively recent feature in Google Chrome where clicking a link from Google Search, or clicking a link sent to you by a colleague, jumps you halfway down a long webpage and automatically highlights a specific block of text in bright yellow. This is Chrome’s “Scroll to Text Fragment” feature. While it is incredibly useful for pointing someone directly to a specific sentence in a massive document, it can be highly annoying if you prefer to read a page from the top down and find the highlighted text distracting. When you click these deep links, Chrome forces your attention to the highlighted section, bypassing any introductory context.
How to Remove the Highlight from the URL
The yellow highlighting is not caused by a setting stored inside Chrome; rather, it is triggered by specific code added to the end of the URL you just clicked.
If someone sends you a link, or if you copy a link from a Google Search snippet, look closely at the address bar. You will see a string of text at the very end of the URL that looks something like this:
#:~:text=specific%20words%20here
1. To read the page normally without the highlight and without jumping down the page, simply click into your Chrome address bar.
2. Delete everything from the #:~:text= onward.
3. Press Enter to reload the page.
The page will load from the very top, in its natural state, with absolutely no yellow highlighting.
How to Prevent Creating Highlighted Links
Chrome also has a feature called “Copy link to highlight.” If you highlight text on a page, right-click, and select this option, Chrome automatically generates that messy URL. If you find this annoying and only want to send clean, standard URLs to your friends or colleagues:
1. Simply copy the URL directly from the address bar at the top of the browser.
2. Do not use the right-click “Copy link to highlight” context menu option.
Unfortunately, because this is an open web standard rather than a toggleable Chrome setting, there is no single button in the Settings menu to globally disable the browser from ever rendering the yellow text when a specialized link is clicked. You must manually strip the fragment from the URL if it bothers you.