Google has disabled The Great Suspender, an extension that was used by Chrome users who were prone to having a lot of tabs open, because, in the words of the message users have been receiving, “it contains malware.”
This has left users with some questions and concerns.
Also: Best Google Chrome extensions in 2021
First, what happened? Well, concerns were raised last year that the extension contained nefarious code after the extension changed hands. More details here on GitHub.
Yesterday, Google pulled the plug on the extension, telling users that it was now blocked, and all mentions of it on the Google Chrome webstore now result in 404s.
If you were a user, the tabs you had suspended are now gone. Well, you can still recover them, but it’s a bit of a faff. It involves searching your history for the ID of the extension (klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg) and then extracting the URL from the string (it’s after the uri=).
Others want to know what to do next.
There are a few extensions that you can use that do similar things. Session Buddy and OneTab sprint to mind.
If you’d rather a paid service, I’ve been using Partizion for the past few months, and I find it really reliable, and once you get used to it, it works really well.
Or, you know, you could limit the number of tabs you have open.
