Bookmarklet

Why Trust Techopedia

What Does Bookmarklet Mean?

A bookmarklet is a tiny program that is stored as a bookmarked URL in a user’s web browser. When clicked, a bookmarklet peforms a basic task, such as submitting a query to a search engine or changing the appearance/configuration of a page.

Advertisements

Bookmarklet combines the names and meaning of “bookmark” and “applet”. They are often just a few lines of code and most often written in JavaScript.

Techopedia Explains Bookmarklet

Essentially, a bookmarklet is just a URL that starts with “javascript:” instead of the standard URL “http://”. Because the browser knows that the protocol to be used is JavaScript, it treats every string after that as JavaScript code. When the code is executed, it will have access to the current page and is free to do what it is programmed for. It can inspect or change elements of the Web page and change settings like the font color without reloading the page.

This method of playing with the website is very safe as it is only executed on the current instance of the page the user sees – it does not change the source of the site.

Advertisements

Related Terms

Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.