How to disable "Scroll to Text Fragment" (yellow highlights and auto-scroll from Google searches)

[rseiler]

What you see below had been working until very recently, so I suspect something has changed. I don't know yet if it's all policy or just this one, but if it's all there's an even larger problem. Unfortunately, I can't pin down exactly when it happened, but somewhere in the v3.4 series of releases.

It used to be handled in a flag, but that's gone now.

But it can be done in the Registry easily enough:

https://cloud.google.com/docs/chrome-enterprise/policies/?policy=ScrollToTextFragmentEnabled

Location (the Vivaldi key won't be there, so make it): HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Vivaldi

Name: ScrollToTextFragmentEnabled

Type: REG_DWORD

Value: 0

You will need to restart Vivaldi. If you have more than one Vivaldi, it applies to all.

[Pathduck]

@rseiler Both the command argument and the GPO seems to work here both for my default snapshot and the latest 3.4 stable.

https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/#disable-scroll-to-text-fragment

Problem is that even when disabled, if you click the first Google suggestion it will still put the text fragment in the URL. It just won't scroll or highlight. So best is to just not click on the first suggestion... it could probably be hidden with an adblocker rule too.

[rseiler]

@Pathduck Wow, thanks, and that's very observant.

I was fixating on the URL and didn't even consider that the highlighting wasn't there, since for me the URL has always been what I didn't like about the feature.

I didn't notice that it was only the first result.

And good to know that the switch is still there, since for some reason (back when I first looked into this) I thought it either didn't work or was removed (like the flag was removed).

[Pathduck]

@rseiler No worries, and here's a quick and dirty blocker rule if you want to hide the evil thing:

! Hide Google "Scroll to Text Fragment" result
google.*##div.answered-question

Note that Google being the b*astards that they are use a lot of obfuscated class names and might change it at any moment if it suits them.