Rewind for X: Find the Post Your Timeline Just Ate

You know the move. You open X, see half of something interesting, scroll a little too far, and the timeline refreshes as if the post never existed. Search rarely helps because you remember one phrase, maybe the avatar, and none of the words X thinks matter.

Rewind for X is a small Chrome extension built for that exact annoyance. It keeps a local list of posts you have already seen on X's Home timeline, then lets you search that list later. It is not an X archive, not a read-later app, and not a way to download someone else's account. The scope is narrower and, frankly, more useful: "I saw this post a minute ago. Where did it go?"

The current Chrome Web Store release is 0.2.0, updated November 10, 2026. The source is MIT-licensed and the extension is free. It is an independent project, not affiliated with X Corp.

What we actually tried

We did not sign in to X or record anyone's real timeline. Instead, we loaded the extension from its GitHub source into Chromium 158 and pointed it at local mock pages using X's timeline markup at x.com/home. That matters: the extension's real content script ran, but the posts were synthetic and no account was touched.

The desktop test passed. A post counted as seen once its visible portion reached the smaller threshold of half the post's height or 40% of the viewport height. Rewind for X then saved the author, text, images, link and quoted-post details. A post below the fold stayed out until we scrolled to it. When the mock timeline replaced its posts, the old entries remained in the drawer. Ads were skipped, quotes and reposts were recognized, and a mock post on a thread page was ignored because Rewind only records Home.

The drawer did the useful part without getting precious about it. It listed five saved posts newest first, found "quoted" in the right entry, filtered by images, video, quotes and reposts, closed with Escape or an outside click, and made us click the trash button twice before clearing the list. The mobile-layout test also passed in an emulated 390 px mobile viewport with touch enabled: the button sat above X's compose control and the drawer became a full-screen list with touch-sized controls.

The optional image-text search deserves a separate note. It is off by default. In our English run, the extension downloaded its OCR data, read "Hello Rewind" and "Meeting at 3pm" from a test image, then found that post by searching for the words inside the picture. Turning OCR off removed image text from search; turning it back on reused the downloaded data. Clearing the saved posts also cleared the OCR text. We did not verify the Chinese OCR path in this environment, so treat that part as untested here rather than as a failure on a real X page.

Privacy claims, checked against the source

The privacy policy says posts stay in chrome.storage.local, with no accounts, analytics or upload. The source matches the shape of that claim. The extension asks for storage and offscreen permissions, keeps the newest 3,000 posts, and its content script only runs on x.com and twitter.com. With OCR on, it downloads Tesseract language data from jsDelivr and reads post images locally. Images themselves still load from X's servers, as they would while browsing X.

Local does not mean harmless. This is still a list of posts you saw, sitting in your browser profile. The difference is that Rewind gives you a clear button, and the privacy policy says uninstalling the extension removes its stored data. For a shared computer, that distinction is worth remembering.

The limits

Rewind for X only records the Home timeline. It does not capture posts you open directly, profiles, search results or threads. It keeps the newest 3,000 entries and drops older ones. It is built for Chrome and Chromium-based browsers that support Manifest V3 extensions, not Firefox or Safari. And because it reads X's page structure, a future X redesign could break it until the extension catches up.

That last risk is normal for a young extension. The project appeared on November 9 and the store build is version 0.2.0, so this is early software. The tight scope works in its favor: there is less to maintain than in a full Twitter client or a general-purpose archiver.

Verdict

If you use X on the web and regularly lose a post to the Home refresh, Rewind for X fits a narrow job. It worked on our synthetic X pages, kept its data local, and never touched a real account in the test. What we did not prove is that it will keep working against X's live markup after the next redesign. Treat it as a promising early extension, not a guaranteed archive. If you need a permanent archive, a cross-browser tool, or something that records profiles and threads, this is not that tool. It aims to be a rewind button for the timeline you already saw, and that restraint is the appealing part.

Image credit: official Rewind for X screenshot with fictional posts, from the MIT-licensed GitHub repository.