Create text fragment link from selected text

[bric3]

FF 131 started to support text fragments URLs (as an experimental feature it seems), what would be great for user awareness and usage is to be able to create link from the selected content (after a right click, or other interaction in mobile apps).

Multiple text fragments are supported in the URL, but a user generally selects only one portion of text so I would only support one text fragment at first. And maybe later think about supporting multiple text fragments but I believe that could be the work of an extension to support multiple text fragments.

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[bric3]

@JonBy any chance, would it be something that could pick the interest of Firefox team ? Also thank you for your time here !

Note as some users I need to use a different browser at work, Google Chrome, and I noticed they actually have this implemented, and I found this useful in daily life.

[bric3]

I discovered that Safari on iOS also had a Copy Link with Highlight action.

This creates the following link with the text fragment

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mus%C3%A9e_d'Orsay#:~:text=It%20was%20the%20sixth%2Dmost%2Dvisited%20art%20museum%20in%20the%20world%20in%202022%2C%20and%20second%2Dmost%2Dvisited%20art%20museum%20in%20France%2C%20after%20the%20Louvre.

[BobbyWibowo]

Unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be much interest from other users to vote this. I figured it'd also be fairly trivial for someone to implement this via an add-on, but unfortunately there have yet to be one made.

[BobbyWibowo]

Never mind, there was actually an entry from +2 years ago with decent votes here,
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/copy-link-to-highlight/idi-p/16058

Reading through the comments, I was able to find that a Desktop extension was already made for it,
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-to-text-fragment/
But it does not support mobile.

There are also Bugzilla entries here,
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779688
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1948471

[bric3]

Folks from Firefox told me this was under development, and gave me this ticket to follow.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779688

This is currently feature flagged `dom.text_fragments.create_text_fragment.enabled`, and currently has bugs. That said, it's worth checking it out.