Google reportedly blocked the popular The Great Suspender extension and removed it from its Chrome Web Store for containing malware. But if you were one of the many users who trusted the tab manager to keep your browser running smoothly, don’t freak out yet. You can still be able to recover your lost guides thanks to an alternative solution discovered by the extension community.
On Thursday, users started receiving notifications that The Great Suspender was “disabled because it contains malware”. The extension, which was installed more than 2 million times before it was deactivated, it forced all tabs you weren’t using to hibernate, replacing them with a gray screen until you returned and restarted them with a click. That way, you can still keep a zillion tabs open without the Google browser taking up your device’s memory and potentially slowing performance.
But, I hear some of you ask, couldn’t you just have fewer guides open and would that solve the problem too? And to that, my four dozen pages of articles that I will probably never read and I ask that you please keep this logic to yourself, thank you very much.
Last year, The Great Suspender underwent a new administration, and it seems that this is where the problems started. Its creator, Dean Oemcke, sold the extension to an unknown third party in June, and subsequent version updates included an exploit that could be used to silently execute virtually any type of code on users’ devices without their consent, for example. the register. Microsoft Edge has already kicked The Great Suspender out of its extension market after the discovery of this exploit, and now it looks like Google has done the same.
If you used the extension and want to recover your tabs now that it has been disabled, you’re in luck. The extension community found a promising, though irritating, alternative solution to reviving their lost guides. Just access your browser history – navigate to chrome: // history or press Ctrl-H while in the browser – and search for the extension ID: “klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg”.
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This will display all of your suspended tabs and, at the end of the absurdly long URL for each result, is the actual address of the tab you opened. If you delete all the jargon before that, you should keep the URL of the page you were on. Therefore, if the URL starts with “https: //”, delete everything before that must provide the URL for the drop-down tab.
It’s boring, to be sure, but better than just saying “RIP” to each tab you opened before the extension was disabled. The developers at Google and The Great Suspender did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.