You can click to unhighlight. I find it useful for linking to a section of a page without an anchor nearby.

I don’t have Chrome, could you elaborate? Where is the highlighter and what does it do?

The link points to "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox#:~:text=In%2...."

In case that renders as a link by Hacker News, I've added a space here and removed the https part:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers%27_paradox #:~:text=In%20astrophysics%20and%20physical%20cosmology,infinite%20and%20eternal%20static%20universe.

What it does is that it highlights that text in the page, with a yellow background color. Making the rest of the text difficult to read (your eyes are drawn to the very yellow highlighted part).

I love it, and have been manually creating such links every day since discovering the feature. One should be able to link to any portion of a page, and now one can, largely. The highlighting ought to be something a browser allows a user to customize, but I really wish Firefox (which I use about half the time) had the feature.

Agreed (I use Firefox), but (from being forced to use Chrome) you should be able to get the highlight to go away by clicking somewhere else on the page or by scrolling.

More details at https://chromestatus.com/feature/4733392803332096 and https://github.com/WICG/scroll-to-text-fragment/

That reminded me to look for extensions that automatically move mobile wikipedia links to desktop ones; thankfully there's one for both Chrome and FF.

yes: https://github.com/spixy/NoMoreMobile

Would love to see that rendered superfluous https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_20...