Google has reportedly blocked the popular extension The Great Suspender and removed it from its Chrome Web Store because it contains malware. But if you were one of the many users who relied on the page manager to keep your browser running smoothly, you should not do so yet. You may still be able to recover your lost tabs thanks to a solution exposed by the community of extension.
On Thursday, users received notifications that The Great Suspender was “disabled because it contained malware”. The extension, which is more than installed 2 million times Before disabling it, the tabs you are not currently using would be forced to sleep and replaced with a gray screen until you return and restart it with a click. This way, you can still keep a million tabs open without the Google browser increasing the memory of your device and possibly slowing down the performance.
But I hear some of you ask, would not you just be able to have fewer tabs open in general, and that would also solve the problem? And besides, my four dozen articles that I will probably never read, and I ask that you please keep the logic to yourself, thank you very much.
Last year, The Great Suspender came under new management, and that’s apparently where the problems started. The 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 silence almost any type of code on users’ devices without their permission, according to the register. Microsoft Edge has already kicked The Great Suspender off its expansion market after discovering this exploit, and it now appears that Google has followed suit.
If you’ve used the extension and want to restore your tabs after it’s turned off, you’ll be lucky. The community of extension has found a promising, though annoying solution to revive your lost tabs. Simply go to your browser history – navigate to chrome: // history or press Ctrl-H while in the browser – and look for the extension ID: “klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg”.
G / O Media can get a commission
This will bring up all your suspended tabs, and at the end of the absurdly long URL of each result is the actual address of the page you opened. If you delete all the chatter before it, you must leave the URL of the page you were on. So if the URL starts with ‘https: //’, you will need to remove the URL for your suspended tab when you delete it.
It’s probably boring, but better than just saying “RIP” for every tab you had before the extension was disabled. Google and The Great Suspender’s developers did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo.