Custom user scripts are the best way to mold the internet into what you want, rather than what the site owner and advertisers want. I’ve built a large collection of my own over time and talked about a few on this site. For example: Automatic Prime Filtering and Automatic Site Refresh. I’ll keep posting more in the coming weeks.

How userscripts work

A userscript manager is a browser extension that runs JavaScript on pages you visit. You install the extension once, then add custom scripts to it. Each script targets specific sites and runs automatically when you load a matching page.

Scripts are easy to find on the main directory Greasy Fork. You’ll find scripts for almost anything like stripping ads, adding keyboard shortcuts, fixing broken site features, and downloading content. Search for the site name and see what comes up.

It’s important to remember that the security part matters. A userscript runs with the same access as the page itself, which means it can read what you type, see what you load, and make network requests. Most scripts with high ratings should be fine. Just know that you can’t tell from the description alone. The only way to actually know is to read the code before you install it, but if youi can’t, just stick to scripts with a large install count, recent updates, and reviews that aren’t five stars posted on the same day.

The point is, don’t just trust random scripts on the internet. Obviously I’m cool, so you can blindly trust me.

Which userscript manager to use

There are three real options: ViolentMonkey, TamperMonkey, and FireMonkey.

FireMonkey is Firefox-only, so that rules it out for not being a universal solution. TamperMonkey works fine, but it’s closed source, had a couple of privacy scares, and Chrome briefly pulled it from their store a while back. It might have been a Google / Manifest V3 policy issue or something, but it didn’t help us gain confidence in the product. TamperMonkey also asks for permissions that it probably shouldn’t need.

ViolentMonkey is open source, asks for less, and doesn’t have the drama.

The problem

The way Twitter wants you to share a funny video is by sharing a link directly to the tweet. It’s way too many steps for them to watch a simple video, and that’s if they have a Twitter account. Instead of going through all that nonsense, this could be fixed with a custom userscript and imported into ViolentMonkey.

So I made one.

Get the script

Download it here, add it to your userscript manager, and refresh the Twitter page. When you see a video, hit play and the download button will appear.

Note that this only works with videos within the original poster’s tweet. If someone quoted the tweet, the script won’t be able to find the video url successfully.