I use ChatGPT with a decent amount of very long-running conversations, and the recent change to how older messages load has made them much harder to use.
Previously, I could open a long chat and use the scrollbar to move through the entire conversation. There was also a navigation control on the right, which made jumping back to older parts of the chat really easy.
Now, older messages only load gradually as I scroll upward. The right side navigation scrollbar also only works if I have scrolled to the top most message
For short chats this probably doesn’t matter much, but for people who deliberately keep long conversations and treat them almost like ongoing notebooks/workspaces, it’s a pretty big downgrade. Going back to something from weeks ago now means repeatedly scrolling upward, waiting for another chunk to load, scrolling again, and so on.
I understand why lazy loading has been introduced and I don’t think lazy loading itself needs to disappear.
I would love if we were given the option to choose between progressive loading, or loading the whole conversation at once.
What I’d really like is some way to navigate the entire conversation regardless of what is currently loaded, for example:
- bring back the Table of Contents
- let the scrollbar represent the whole conversation
- allow jumping directly to an older message/section and load that area on demand
- ideally, give users an option to disable lazy loading if they prefer the old behavior
The old navigation made long conversations genuinely useful as persistent spaces. I’d really like to see that functionality restored in some form.
I know I’m not the only person affected by this, so I’m posting it here as a feature request