Update, 14 July 2020

With Chrome 84, Google has now removed the ability to disable the ScrollToTextFragment feature, so this whole write-up is now obsolete

What is ScrollToTextFragment

With Chrome 80, Google has introduced a new ScrollToTextFragment feature that allows you to reference an anchor link by any phrase that’s in a webpage, even if the author of the page hasn’t created an anchor link.

You can see this setting by going to chrome://flags in your Chrome browser (assuming you’re using version 80+).

By default, Chrome 80 has the setting enabled.

And, for example, you can create a direct link to the Recent Posts part of my blog by just appending #:~:text=Recent%20Posts to the end of the website URL.

If you disable this setting, however, the regular old webpage behavior returns.

So visiting the URL with that appended part will do nothing but show you the top of the webpage.

Why might you want to disable ScrollToTextFragment?

David Bokan (from Chromium, the open source project Chrome is based on) wrote up a Google Doc called Scroll-to-text Fragment Navigation – Security Issues (PUBLIC) that explains some potential issues.

How can I automate disabling ScrollToTextFragment?

Well, as of this writing (March, 2020), there doesn’t appear to be a way you can disable this via policy, so the best way I’ve come across to do so is via script. It’s a bit convoluted, but it works—here’s my Munki nopkg for disabling ScrollToTextFragment.

Because changing that setting requires a relaunch of Chrome, the nopkg has GoogleChrome as a blocking application, which means if you want to enforce this, you may have to add a force_install_after_date key to the pkginfo, because the chances that your users will see a pending Managed Software Center update, quit of Chrome, install the update, and then launch up Chrome again are probably fairly low.