Going from 150s to <1s: Replacing DOM scraping with a site's internal RPC API in a Chrome extension
Google AI Studio has no way to export a conversation. I wanted one, so I built an open source Chrome extension, AI Studio Exporter . Version 1 did what every exporter does: scroll the page to the top, wait for messages to render, and read them out of the DOM. Version 2 stopped touching the page at all and calls the same internal API that the AI Studio frontend calls. For a 200-message…
Google AI Studio offers no conversation export feature, so the developer built an open-source Chrome extension called AI Studio Exporter. The first version of the extension worked by scrolling to the top of the page, waiting for messages to render, and extracting them from the DOM. The second version stopped scrolling and instead queried the same internal API that the AI Studio frontend utilized.
This dramatically improved the export speed for a 200-message conversation, reducing it from around 150 seconds to under a second. The source material details the reasoning behind switching from DOM scraping to using the internal RPC API in the Chrome extension, the challenges faced, the API calls made, authentication methods, and how attachments are handled.
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