The GUI on my Safari browser is now so slow I can’t ask more than 5 to 10 questions before it freezes and starts becoming unresponsive. am I the only one experiencing this?
Hi @thomas11,
Yeah, that kind of slowdown after a few prompts can get annoying fast.
What’s likely happening here is the browser session building up memory over time, especially on Safari.
Longer chats, lots of context, or even extensions can start dragging performance down.
A few things that have helped others:
- Do a hard refresh or open a fresh tab and start a new chat
- Clear cache/cookies for ChatGPT
- Try another browser (Chrome usually handles longer sessions a bit better)
- Disable extensions temporarily, especially ad blockers or privacy tools
- Restart the browser after a few longer runs
Not ideal, but these steps usually help narrow down if it’s browser-related or something else.
Full troubleshooting steps are here: Why is my ChatGPT taking so long to respond?
Should it keep happening, sharing your Safari version and whether it seems more noticeable in longer threads could help us investigate further.
-Mark G.
It’s definitely the browser, and these are good advice - The problem is it’s alone having these issues. Gemini for instance in their web UI, clips out the first messages, as you add more, and never become unresponsive. In fact, I’ve built a better GUI myself (one of my developers did), that does not have these issues.
They’re spending like 500 billion dollars on their LLM, maybe spend some few hundred bucks on their GUI. I’m sure I could have fixed this myself, in a couple of hours using Codex, if I had access to the frontend code.
It’s just “bad coding”, and it’s been like this since they launched - But with better models, it becomes more visible, since you have longer convos.
They really need to fix this …
Thx for answering. Your product is too good to be hampered by bad UX …
Fact are, probably most people who are switching to Claude or Gemini these days, are doing it because “ChatGPT is bad”. I’d bet $100 on that if you fix the GUI, 90% of those would not say it’s “bad” anymore …
Hi @thomas11, I hear you, that lag and UI slowdown gets old fast, especially when the rest of the product is strong.
You’re not wrong that longer conversations tend to make this more noticeable. What’s happening is the current UI doesn’t always handle large threads or heavy context as smoothly as it could, so things like clipping, responsiveness, and rendering can degrade over time. Other tools take different approaches there, so the comparison makes sense.
I’ve shared your feedback with the team, especially the points around conversation handling at scale and overall responsiveness. This is one of those areas where a lot of small UX improvements can make a big difference.
Appreciate you calling it out directly, and the context around why it matters.
-Mark G.
Well, you’ve got like 800 million users on this thing every week. I guarantee you that 50% or more are experiencing the same thing, they’re just not telling you.
Most will simply assume “your product is worse” because the GUI keeps on crashing, and switch LLM vendors. While probably less than 0.1% are actually telling you about their experience. The rest simply “vote with the feet” …
It’s a cheap fix, that would probably significantly reduce the “bleeding” for OpenAI …
I’ve seen you’ve done some updates to the GUI, and it’s become better the last couple of days, but the primary issue STILL remains. And the primary issue is that it simply “crashes” when I’ve got like 5/10 + pages of scrolling, to the point where it’s not even responsive. It takes me sometimes 50 seconds before I can even click the “Copy” button, etc, etc, etc …
Initially it didn’t matter that much. People would ask one 1 to 5 prompts, get their answers, and move on. Now with GPT5.4 we’ve got convos spanning 100+ messages, and the assumption is that everything should “simply work”.
This is probably the single largest “fail” you currently have I would suspect, and a reason why so many are saying “Claude/Gemini/Whatever is better” - Even though technically, that’s not true …
Luv you guys, great work, but please fix this GUI issue, it’s incredibly annoying!! Like to the point where it doubles the amount of time I need to spend to perform my work …
Thank you 