Download Twitter Videos with a One-Click Bookmarklet

You search the Chrome Web Store for a Twitter video downloader and find a dozen of them, all with five-star ratings and names that blur together. You install one. It asks to "read and change all your data on all websites," which is a lot of trust for a save button. Two weeks later it stops working after a Twitter update, or it quietly starts injecting ads, or it vanishes from the store entirely and leaves a dead icon in your toolbar. Anyone who has used these for a while knows the cycle.

There's a smaller tool that does the same job without any of that. A bookmarklet is a bookmark whose address is a short line of JavaScript instead of a web address. Click it while you're looking at a tweet and it opens that tweet in the downloader with the link already filled in. Nothing installs, nothing runs in the background, and nothing asks for permission to read your browsing.

Short answer: make a new bookmark, paste the code below as its URL, and click it whenever a tweet is open. The downloader launches with that tweet loaded and ready to save.

The bookmarklet

javascript:void(open('https://download-twitter-video.drummerduck.com/?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)))

That single line is the whole thing. It reads the address of the tab you're on and opens the downloader with that address attached.

How to add it

1. Show your bookmarks bar if it's hidden. In Chrome and Edge that's Ctrl+Shift+B on Windows or Cmd+Shift+B on a Mac.
2. Right-click the bookmarks bar and choose Add page or Add bookmark.
3. Name it something you'll recognize, like Save Tweet Video.
4. In the URL or address field, paste the code above.
5. Save it to the bookmarks bar so it sits one click away.

A few browsers strip the leading javascript: when you paste, thinking they're protecting you. If your bookmark does nothing when clicked, edit it and check that the address still starts with javascript:. Retype those characters if they got trimmed.

How it works

When you click the bookmarklet on a tweet's page, it grabs the current page URL through location.href, wraps it in encodeURIComponent so any special characters travel safely, and opens the downloader with the tweet attached as a ?url= parameter. You end up at an address shaped like this:

https://download-twitter-video.drummerduck.com/?url=<the tweet URL>

The downloader reads that parameter, drops the link into its input box, and starts extracting the media on its own. By the time the page finishes loading, the quality buttons are usually already there. You pick a resolution, up to 1080p Full HD, and the MP4 saves to your machine. There's also a /d/<base64url-encoded-url> form of the deeplink if you'd rather pass an encoded address, which is handy when you're building the link from a script.

Why not just use an extension?

Browser extensions can do more than a bookmarklet, and that's exactly the problem. To rewrite the page or hook into Twitter's video player, most of them request permission to read and change data on every site you visit, not only Twitter. That access sits there whether the extension is doing anything with it or not, and you have to trust both the current developer and whoever might buy the extension later. Extensions that scrape a specific site also break on the site's schedule. Twitter reworks its player and its markup often, and each change can leave a scraping extension dead until someone ships a patch.

A bookmarklet sidesteps all of that. The code is visible in the bookmark itself, so you can read exactly what it does. It only runs the instant you click it, it touches nothing but the current tab's address, and the actual extraction happens on the downloader's own servers rather than inside your browser. When Twitter changes something, the fix lands server-side and your bookmark keeps working untouched. For a one-click save, the smaller tool is the safer one.

Mobile alternatives

Bookmarklets are clumsy on phones, since most mobile browsers make it hard to run a bookmark's JavaScript from the address bar. Use the share sheet instead:

• On iPhone, copy the tweet link and paste it into the site, or set up an Apple Shortcut. The iPhone guide walks through both.
• On Android, install the site as an app so it appears inside Twitter's Share menu as a Web Share Target. See the Android guide.

Troubleshooting

Clicking the bookmark does nothing. The javascript: prefix was probably stripped when you pasted. Edit the bookmark and make sure the address still begins with javascript:.

A new window is blocked. Some setups treat open() as a pop-up. Allow pop-ups for the downloader's domain, or click the bookmarklet a second time after the browser shows its blocked-pop-up notice.

The downloader opens but finds nothing. Confirm you were on the tweet's own page, not a search results list or a profile grid, so location.href points at the actual post. Protected or deleted tweets won't extract for anyone.

Frequently asked questions

Is this a browser extension?

No. It's a bookmark that runs one line of JavaScript when you click it. There's nothing to install and no permissions to approve.

Is it safe?

The code only reads the current page's address and opens the downloader with it. It collects nothing and never runs on its own in the background. You can read the whole thing before you save it.

Does it work in every browser?

On desktop, yes. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge all run bookmarklets.

What if I'd rather just paste the link?

That works too. The how-to guide covers the manual flow, and developers can call the REST API or an MCP server instead.

Only download public content you have the right to use, and respect copyright.