The Great Suspender extension has been removed from Chrome Web Store for containing malware

This afternoon, Google has delisted the popular extension The Great Suspender for containing malware and is proactively disabling the extension for those who have it.

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

Subsequently, with version 7.1.8, The Great Suspender added an exploit that could be used to run almost any kind of code on your computer without your knowledge. This exploit led the extension to be removed from Microsoft Edge’s extensions marketplace, but The Great Suspender was allowed to stay on the Chrome Web Store as a later update reportedly removed the exploit.

This afternoon, Google seems to have enforced a removal of The Great Suspender for containing malware, delisting the extension from the Chrome Web Store. Further, anyone who previously had The Great Suspender installed in Chrome has had the extension forcibly disabled by Chrome.

Unfortunately, for those who were active users of The Great Suspender, this forced disabling of the extension has caused any suspended tabs to be closed and effectively lost. Luckily, the extension’s community has found a way to potentially uncover your lost tabs. Simply open chrome://history — you can also open this by pressing Ctrl-H in Chrome — and searching for The Great Suspender’s extension ID: “klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg.” Each result should be a tab you had suspended, and at the end of each URL is the URL of the page you were looking for.

For example, a suspended tab may 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.com/

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

It’s unknown if this malware issue will see The Great Suspender permanently removed from the Chrome Web Store, or if it will be restored in time. In the meantime, the community has forked the last malware-free version of The Great Suspender to create The Marvellous Suspender, which is available now on the Chrome Web Store.

h/t Justin Duino, Dylan Roussel