It appears that Google has 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 tab manager to keep your browser running smoothly, don’t panic yet. You maybe more to be able to recover lost tabs due to a solution discovered by the extension community.
On Thursday, users began receiving notifications that “The Great Suspender” has been “disabled because it contains malware.” The extension, which was installed more than 2 million times Before it was turned off, it would force any tabs you are not currently using to sleep, replacing them with a gray screen until you came back and relaunched them with a click. This way, you could keep another million tabs open without your Google browser hiding your device’s memory and potentially slowing down your performance.
But, I hear some of you ask, couldn’t you just have fewer tabs open in general and that would solve the problem as well? And for that, the four dozen pages of articles that I will probably never read and please keep your logic to yourself, thank you very much.
Last year, The Great Suspender went in a new direction 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 run almost any type of code on users’ devices without their consent. The register. Microsoft Edge kicked off The Great Suspender in its extension market after discovering this feat, and now it seems that Google has followed suit.
If you used the extension and are looking to recover your tabs now that it has been disabled, you’re in luck. The extension community has found a promising, albeit annoying, solution to reviving lost pages. Simply access your browser history – either navigate to chrome: // history or press Ctrl-H while you’re in the browser – and search for the extension ID: “klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg”.
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It will show all suspended tabs, and at the end of the absurdly long URL of each result is the actual address of the tab you opened. If you delete all images before, you should be left with the URL of the page you were on. So if the URL starts with “https: //”, deleting everything before it should give you the URL of the suspended tab.
It’s boring, sure, but better than saying “RIP” to every tab you had before the extension was disabled. Developers Google and The Great Suspender did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.