1779688 - Implement "Copy Link to Highlight" links

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement, P2)

Description

[Matthew Jurgens]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/102.0

Steps to reproduce:

It would be extremely useful if Firefox would support Chrome's "Copy Link to Highlight" feature.

Leaving this feature out of Firefox gives users one more reason to switch to a Chromium-based browser and stay there.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/10256233?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop

This appears to have been implemented as an extension here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/link-to-text-fragment/ but is only somewhat useful as it does not have guaranteed ubiquity - you need to have both parties involved in the link sharing/viewing with this ability.

Comment 1

[Matthew Jurgens]

What is the best way to submit this enhancement request for all Firefox platforms/editions/versions/platforms eg Firefox for Android?
Duplicate item and change Product/platform?

As previously stated this is most useful if it is ubiquitous

Comment 2

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'WebExtensions::Untriaged' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 3

[Kris Maglione [:kmag]]

Note that this depends on bug 1753933 for us to be able to load the generated links, and the frontend code, when it exists, should verify that the document policy for the page allows loading text fragment links before offering to generate them.

Comment 4

[Hsin-Yi Tsai (she/her) [:hsinyi]]

Per comment 3, this is a front-end feature which depends on bug 1753933 for the underlying platform support.

Comment 5

[kyle.p.loveless]

I would add that when Chrome generates "Copy link to Highlight" URLs, like this one: https://ised-isde.canada.ca/cc/lgcy/popMsg.html#bsnssnmbr:~:text=The%20Business%20Number%20(BN)%20is%20part, it also includes the anchor, but Firefox does not recognize the anchor either (presumably because it is including everything after the '#'?).

Perhaps an intermediate step is to support just jumping to anchor, while waiting for the full feature.

Comment 6

[Jan Jaeschke [:jjaschke]]

Hi Kyle,

thank you for the suggestion. I've filed Bug 1890733 for this, this should ride the next release train.

Comment 7

[Elliott Tallis [:pointy]]

Could I also recommend alongside this feature the complimentary "Remove highlight" context menu item? It simply unhighlights the fragment when visiting a page with one, much like the Chrome implementation.

Comment 10

[Mr. Beedell, Roke Julian Lockhart (RJLB)]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779688#a71336434_430528

[e-mail], this isn't a duplicate. Fragment directives direct the user to a string, which can vary at any time for any reason. IDs on a lot pages are deliberarely persistent.

Comment 11

[Mr. Beedell, Roke Julian Lockhart (RJLB)]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1779688#c10

*deliberately

Comment 12

[jaime [:jabramson]]

Attachment: WIP: Bug 1779688 - Add copy text fragment context menu items

Comment 14

[Jan Jaeschke [:jjaschke]]

Attachment: Bug 1779688 - Add copy text fragment context menu items. r=mconley!

This patch adds context menu entries to create a link to the current selection
of a site ("Text Fragment") and copies it to the clipboard.
Furthermore, if any Text Fragments are visible on the page,
it adds a context menu entry to remove these highlights.

This patch was mostly written by :jabramson.

Comment 15

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/21c27f2ca5fa
Add copy text fragment context menu items. r=mconley,fluent-reviewers,bolsson

Comment 16

[Serban Stanca [:SerbanS]]

Backed out for causing mochitests failures in browser_copy_link_to_highlight.js.

• Backout link
• Push with failures
• Failure Log
• Failure line: TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | browser/base/content/test/contextMenu/browser_copy_link_to_highlight.js | uncaught exception - NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE: Component returned failure code: 0x80070057 (NS_ERROR_ILLEGAL_VALUE) [nsIIOService.createExposableURI] at copyStrippedLink@chrome://browser/content/nsContextMenu.sys.mjs:2314:19

Comment 17

[Jan Jaeschke [:jjaschke]]

Try run with a fix: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/jobs?repo=try&revision=73c821f7515dce19e321551627c344e0b0a9a5fa

Comment 18

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/13e62ea850a7
Add copy text fragment context menu items. r=mconley,fluent-reviewers,bolsson

Comment 19

[Serban Stanca [:SerbanS]]

Backed out for causing devtools failures in browser_jsterm_autocomplete_mapped_variables.js.

• Backout link
• Push with failures
• Failure Log
• Failure line: TEST-UNEXPECTED-FAIL | devtools/client/webconsole/test/browser/browser_jsterm_autocomplete_mapped_variables.js | Autocomplete popup displays original variable name when entering a complete variable name -

Comment 20

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/ed5e69954117
Add copy text fragment context menu items. r=mconley,fluent-reviewers,bolsson

Comment 21

[Sandor Molnar[:smolnar]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/ed5e69954117

Comment 22

[Tom S. (please needinfo tschuster)]

Please consider requesting a release note for this feature.

Comment 23

[Kagami Rosylight [:saschanaz] (they/them)]

This is still behind dom.text_fragments.create_text_fragment.enabled which is disabled by default everywhere, so maybe too early to have a release note?

Comment 24

[Jan Jaeschke [:jjaschke]]

Yes, this is currently behind a pref and will likely require QA testing before being released.