A recent update to Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers introduced a bug with highlighting text. Many websites and web apps are affected, and will have to be updated to fix the new behavior.

Chrome 131 changed how browsers handle text selection styles, specifically impacting the inheritance behavior of selection properties. This means you might not see highlighted text when you select it, even though you can still usually copy and paste the text. This is because the update is clashing with a popular website design tool called Tailwind CSS. Chrome used to style selected text based on the ::selection pseudo-element of the element itself. Chrome 131 now uses a parent element inheritance model, which basically makes it incompatible with certain CSS frameworks.

The issue has been reported on GitHub, The Verge, Bloomberg, and other online forums. The extent of affected websites remains unclear, but Adam Wathan, the creator of Tailwind CSS, has pointed out the issue and provided a simple workaround. Once website owners add a feature flag or update their Tailwind CSS, the issue should be fix The complication affects browsers using recent Chromium versions, but other browsers that use different rendering engines still work as normal, including Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

Google made a post in October about the upcoming change, but the stance was that it "shouldn't cause a visible impact for most sites." While there aren't enough reports to say that most sites are affected, it definitely affected a few high-traffic sites. This is completely unintentional, as Google's update was meant to be a solution for a more intuitive and consistent way of handling text highlighting across different elements. Browser engine updates aren't generally supposed to break existing online content, but it can happen occasionally, especially with websites relying on insecure or legacy browser features.

Source: Adam Wathan, The Verge