Butter for ChatGPT

Makes long ChatGPT chats smooth: no freezes while answers stream, instant scrollbar previews, and a question rail.

ChatGPT on the web gets painfully slow in long conversations. While an answer streams in, the page freezes, scrolling stutters, typing shows up seconds late, and dragging the scrollbar makes the page hitch. Butter fixes that, entirely inside your browser. In a long math chat (lab measurements, median of 5 runs): • Page frozen while an answer streams: 75 s without Butter → 13 s with it • Slowest 5% of frames while it streams: 300 ms → 50 ms • Slowest keystroke in a long chat: 5.4 s → under 1 s • Frame time while you drag the scrollbar: 3.1 s → 33 ms SMOOTHER STREAMING Long answers stream in without freezing the page. Butter stops Chrome from redoing the layout of the whole conversation on every update, skips messages that are off screen, and lets the answer arrive in slightly bigger steps, so you can keep scrolling and typing. SMOOTHER SCROLLING • Drag the scrollbar and Butter shows a light preview of where you are; the real messages load once, when you let go. • Earlier messages load in small pieces, and wait while you hold the scrollbar, so the thumb never jumps away from your mouse. • Send a question while scrolled far up, and Butter jumps close to the end first, so your question shows up about 3× sooner. QUESTION RAIL A slim rail on the right of the chat with one tick per question. Hover to preview a question, click to jump to it. While you drag the scrollbar, the rail lights up the question you are passing. REMEMBER LONG-CHAT LAYOUTS (optional) Butter can remember the sizes of answers you have already read, so the scrollbar preview and jumps land on the right spot after you reopen a chat. It saves numbers only (heights, positions and one-way hashes), never chat text. Saved layouts expire after 30 days, are capped at 50 MB, and can be cleared from the popup. Butter asks before it starts saving. PRIVACY Butter runs only on chatgpt.com and works entirely inside your browser. It has no server, no analytics and no tracking, and it never sends anything anywhere. Privacy policy: https://github.com/SimianW/butter/blob/main/PRIVACY.md SETTINGS Click the Butter icon to turn Butter on or off, switch any of the four groups above, see how much layout data is saved, clear it, and choose English or 中文. If ChatGPT changes its page and a feature stops working, the popup tells you which one; Butter never breaks the page. Numbers are from a lab machine; yours depend on your computer and the chat. Free and open source (MIT): https://github.com/SimianW/butter