The Great Suspender removed from Chrome for malware

This afternoon, Google removed the popular extension The Great Suspender to contain malware and is proactively disabling the extension for those who have it.

The Great Hanger is – or perhaps was – an extension that forced its excess tabs to sleep, helping to prevent Chrome from using too much RAM and other resources. Last year, as explained in detail by TheMageKing, the development of The Great Suspender changed hands and was subsequently sold to an unknown third party.

Later, with version 7.1.8, The Great Suspender added an exploit that could be used to run almost any type of code on your computer without your knowledge. This exploit led to the extension being removed from the Microsoft Edge extension market, but The Great Suspender was allowed to remain on the Chrome Web Store as a later update allegedly removed the exploit.

This afternoon, Google appears to have forced the removal of The Great Suspender to contain malware by removing the extension from the Chrome Web Store. In addition, anyone who already had The Great Suspender installed on Chrome had the extension forcibly disabled by Chrome.

Unfortunately, for those who were active users of The Great Suspender, this forced deactivation of the extension caused all suspended tabs to be closed and effectively lost. Fortunately, the extension community has found a way to potentially reveal its missing tabs. Just open chrome: // history – you can also open it by pressing Ctrl-H in Chrome – and searching for The Great Suspender extension ID: “klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg.” Each result should be a tab that you have suspended and at the end of each URL is the URL of the page you were looking for.

For example, a drop-down tab can have a URL like this:

chrome extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/suspended.html
# ttl = reddit% 3A% 20the% 20front% 20page% 20of% 20the% 20internet & pos = 6807
& uri = https:// www.reddit.with /

At the end, after “uri =” is the URL of your missing suspended tab. In this case, your missing tab was for “https:// www.reddit.with /. “

It is not known whether this malware problem will see The Great Suspender permanently removed from the Chrome Web Store or whether it will be restored in time. In the meantime, the community created the latest malware-free version of The Great Suspender to create The Marvelous Suspender, which is now available on the Chrome Web Store.

h / t Justin Duino

Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more news: