Google Automatically Adds Scroll to Text Fragment to Search Results on Chrome

I honestly dislike this feature, because it leads to very messy looking urls with lots of url escapes in them, as well as the whole `#:~:text` thing: (you might need to click on the url to see the escapes)

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/198590/what-is-a-bi....

Google has been criticized by some experts for implementing the feature in Chrome by default since the feature can have some privacy issues. Here is a tweet https://twitter.com/pes10k/status/1229835239565905921 by Peter Snyder Security Researcher @ Brave and another comment from David Baron from Mozilla https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/194#is....

And it looks like Google is now automatically adding Scroll To Text Fragment to Featured Snippets in Search results, this basically means that if you are on Chrome and click on the Featured Snippet they can automatically scroll and take you to the section of the page where the snippet was lifted from.

Try searching for https://www.google.com/search?q=Will+emojis+and+HTML+tags+wo... on Chrome Desktop. I was able to trigger them from Australia.

Another interesting thing is that it only happens in Chrome, Edge and Firefox did not show them and in some cases, the Featured Snippet did not appear as well, kinda makes the SERPs on other browsers feel quite inferior IMHO. https://www.google.com/search?q=faq+page+Structured+data+typ... – try clicking on different browsers.

Even when the Featured Snippets are shown in these other browsers they don’t get the Scroll To Text Fragment treatment. https://www.google.com/search?q=scroll+to+text+fragment – try clicking on different browsers.

Obviously these other browsers don’t support Scroll To Text Fragment so it’s pointless to show them right, well in the case of Firefox yeah but Edge runs on Chromium and Scroll To Text Fragment actually works on it. Try clicking on https://tldrmarketing.com/about-us/#:~:text=Does%20Konami%20... on Edge.

From what I can see all Featured Snippets are getting the Scroll To Text Fragment treatment on Chrome desktop, would love to see examples when it’s not.