The fall from grace of the Great Suspender Chrome extension

Google forcibly uninstalled the hugely popular “The Great Suspender” extension from Google Chrome and classified it as malware.

The Great Suspender is a Chrome extension that will suspend unused tabs and unload its resources to reduce browser memory usage. When a user is ready to use the tab again, they just need to click on it to make it visible.

This extension has been extremely popular with over 2,000,000 users and has always been a recommended extension due to its ability to reduce Chrome’s memory usage.

When Google deleted it on Thursday, users received a message saying “This extension contains malware,” but without providing additional context on how to recover their suspended tabs or why they deleted it.

With the abrupt removal of The Great Suspender extension, users who had suspended tabs were unhappy that they could no longer access them.

It is possible to see a list of suspended tabs through Chrome’s built-in History feature and use that list to retrieve the URL of the suspended webpage.

You can find instructions on how to do this, as well as other methods, on this support page.

The fall of the large garter belt

In June 2020, the developer of The Great Suspender sold the expansion to an unknown entity because they did not have time to properly maintain the project.

Back then, users were wary of selling and why someone would buy a free open-source extension that didn’t generate any income for the developer.

As free extensions have been purchased in the past and then monetized with malicious modifications, such as injecting ads or stealing information, users were concerned that the same would happen with The Great Suspender.

Unfortunately, the user’s concerns were justified when the new maintainer updated the extension in October 2020 to release 7.1.8, which included scripts that tracked user behavior and executed code retrieved from from a remote server.

This malicious activity led Microsoft to remove the Microsoft Edge Store extension and release a new version 7.1.9 without the malicious scripts.

The extension, however, continued to remain in the hands of these unknown developers, who could introduce malicious code at a later date, potentially without users noticing.

Google on Thursday removed the Chrome Web Store extension as malware, but provided no reason to do so. It is not clear whether Google has discovered any additional malicious scripts or reacted to its story and community concerns.

For those who really want to use The Great Suspender extension, the GitHub project page continues to offer version 7.1.6, which is the final version of the extension when it is owned by the original developer and does not contain any malicious scripts.

To install the extension, you will need to do so through Chrome’s Developer Mode, which is not recommended as it removes the security benefits offered by Google’s extension review process.