Two buttons. One bookmarks bar. Thirty seconds. No browser extension required.
The FoxChat bookmarklet is the no-install path to recording and playing walkthroughs. You drag a button to your browser's bookmarks bar, and from then on, clicking that bookmark on any site opens the FoxChat recorder or player as an overlay on the page you're viewing. This guide covers the install flow end-to-end: showing the bar, dragging the button, verifying the install, and recovering when something looks off.
The Chrome extension is the smoothest path when you can install it: side panel UI, multi-page recording across navigations, screenshot capture via privileged browser APIs. But not every browser, machine, or workplace allows extensions. The bookmarklet covers those cases. It runs the same Shadow DOM toolbar, captures the same DOM identifiers, and produces walkthroughs that play back identically to extension recordings. The only thing the bookmarklet cannot do is survive a full-page navigation — when the host page reloads, the script evaporates and you re-click the bookmarklet to continue on the next page.
If your bookmarks bar is hidden, none of this works. Show it first:
Ctrl+Shift+BCmd+Shift+BCmd+Shift+BYou should see an empty (or populated) horizontal strip directly below the address bar. That's where the bookmarklet lives.
Open getfoxchat.com/bookmarklet in a new tab. You will see two large draggable buttons:
Click and hold the orange button. While holding, drag your cursor up to the bookmarks bar. You will see the cursor change to indicate you can drop a link there. Release. The button is now a bookmarklet on your bar, named + Record walkthrough. Repeat for the cyan Play walkthrough button if you also want to play other people's walkthroughs.
The bookmarklet on the public page contains a placeholder site ID. To record into your own FoxChat account, you need the personalized version that includes your site ID and a short-lived access token. Generate it from the walkthroughs dashboard. The dashboard offers a one-click "copy bookmarklet" button that produces a fully filled-in javascript: URL. Drag that one to your bookmarks bar in place of (or alongside) the public one.
Why two? The public bookmarklet is great for trying recording out without signing in. The personalized one is what you use for actual production walkthroughs that need to land in your dashboard.
Open any website — your own marketing site, a staging URL, even a blog post — and click the bookmarklet on your bar. Within about a second, you should see a small dark toolbar slide in from the bottom-right corner of the page with FoxChat branding. That toolbar is rendered inside a Shadow DOM, so it does not pick up styles from the host site and does not leak its styles outward.
If you do not see the toolbar within a few seconds, see the troubleshooting guide. The most common causes are: the host site has a strict Content-Security-Policy that blocks third-party scripts, or your bookmarks bar copy of the bookmarklet got truncated during a paste.
The bookmarklet uses standard DOM APIs only — Shadow DOM, fetch, CustomEvent, postMessage. There are no Chrome-specific APIs. Confirmed working browsers:
Mobile browsers are out of scope for recording (no bookmarks bar on mobile). The bookmarklet will run if pasted into the address bar on mobile, but the recorder UI is designed for pointer + keyboard input.
The personalized bookmarklet embeds an access token. Tokens have a long lifetime but they do eventually rotate — if your bookmarklet stops authenticating after months of use, regenerate it. From the walkthroughs dashboard, click Regenerate bookmarklet; drag the new button onto your bar; right-click the old bookmarklet and delete it. Same domain, same site ID, fresh token.
The same regeneration flow handles workspace transfers: if your account moves to a new FoxChat workspace, regenerate the bookmarklet so it points at the new workspace's site ID. The old bookmarklet still publishes into the old workspace until you replace it.
Bookmarks bars get crowded. A few patterns we see from heavy users:
Your bookmarklet is installed. Now record your first walkthrough — takes about two minutes.
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