Support Text Fragments

[saiafonua]

I would like Firefox to support text fragments, like Chrome and Safari does. For example, click on this link: https://blog.chromium.org/2019/12/chrome-80-content-indexing-es-modules.html#:~:text=ECMAScript%20Mo.... in chrome or safari and you will see highlighted text. Firefox doesn't highlight or automatically scroll to the targeted text.

Source: https://web.dev/text-fragments/

[Jon]

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[job]

Sttf is still in the drafts and is not a finalized standard, so already this should be shot down.. Besides this should be something an extension should do (and they do exist in the AMO) for those who need it, not added as yet another mostly useless bloat in the browser core IMHO.

[cachi]

There is a similar idea with additional UI details over here.

Also there's already a bug for this where you can track implementation state.

Even an MDN article on Text fragments exists already, only it's not applicable to Firefox.

Mozilla's position on the URL Fragment Text Directives spec is positive, so let's hope it lands quickly as it's really practical.

[JaveWeb]

I would understand the draft argument for some complex feature with unclear behavior. This is not the case though.

The intention is clear as crystal: Jump to the first CTRL+F of the text, optionally, highlight it. Since it can be based on an already existing feature, I would hardly call this a "code bloating".

Web 2.0 added a lot of stuff that were do-able, just unnecessarily complex to do and not-performant, this is the same principle.

I would rather see Firefox literally opening the "Find in This page…" and submitting the text from URL than not to implement it at all 😊 All webkits and blinks already have it... 

[BumbleBeeElegy]

Adding my 👍 here. Firefox is currently the only major browser that doesn't provide any support at all for text fragments (as I discovered today during some testing), so I'm hoping support is added soon. Text fragments are supported in Chrome, Chrome Android, Edge, Opera, Opera Android, Safari, Safari iOS, Samsung Internet, and WebView Android.

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My original source I was trying to determine why a text fragment wasn't working in Firefox:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Text_fragments#browser_compatibility.

I was testing in Firefox first and initially thought it was a compatibility issue elsewhere. I was then able to test and confirm that text fragments work in all those browsers* as well. Support in Safari (macOS) is more limited but text fragments do work there.

* Exception: I wasn't able to text in Safari iOS or Samsung Internet, since I don't have access to an iOS or Samsung device at the moment, but I expect they'll work they're since they're supported.

[ncdave4life]

It's now been more than three years, and Firefox still lacks support for text fragment links. That's the reason I rarely use Firefox, and it's why I don't recommend Firefox to others.

The Web is full of text fragment links, not the least of which are those returned automatically by google searches. None of those links work in Firefox. That's a HUGE disadvantage for Firefox users.

On my own site I've even added a few ":~:text=text fragment" anchors, so that a few specific text fragment links into my own webpages don't break so badly in Firefox: they still don't get highlighted, of course, but at least they go do the right place.

Google/Alphabet is evil, so I'd really rather avoid them whenever possible. So I WANT to like Firefox. But, because of this one huge problem, the browsing experience with Firefox is so severely inferior to Chromium-based browsers, that Firefox just isn't competitive.

[Jon]

Hey all,

Happy to share that this feature is currently being worked on — feel free to track the implementation progress on Bugzilla and stay tuned for updates here on Connect 😀