Google Boots 'The Great Suspender' Off the Chrome Web Store For Being Malware

Google has blocked The Great Suspender extension from the Chrome store "because it contains malware." The extension was very popular for users running Chrome with 8GB or less of RAM, as it would automatically suspend tabs you hadn't used in a while, freeing up precious memory and CPU power. It would then allow you to return to the tab and reload back to where you were. Mishaal Rahman writes via XDA Developers: For some people, this isn't news. Since November of 2020, close followers of the extension have warned that it may be running malicious code. The old maintainer of the extension sold it to an unknown party in June of 2020, and users alleged that the unknown party quietly slipped some trackers into version 7.1.8 of the extension. Although version 7.1.9 removed the tracker, many users were understandably suspicious of the extension. Then in early January of this year, multiple media outlets picked up on the news, and many, including myself, decided to ditch it. Earlier today, however, Google pulled the plug entirely on the popular Chrome extension, forcibly removing The Great Suspender from people's Chrome installations and removing the extension's listing on the Chrome Web Store. You can recover your suspended tabs by opening up your search history and searching for "klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg." If that doesn't work, you can try the other options outlined in this GitHub post.

Some alternatives to The Great Suspender, as recommended by XDA Developers community member TheMageKing, include: Tabs Outliner, Auto Tab Discard, or Session Buddy.

Session Buddy?

[wrongstatistics]

I use Session Buddy.

It doesn't suspend tabs.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Re:

[mattr]

Not Session Buddy. TFA is about The Great Suspender, which suspends tabs, leaving a blank tab as a placeholder.

I am also one of the past users of TGS who participated in the GitHub thread. People announced sketchiness revolving around the change in ownership of TGS, and I am the one who tried out Tabs Outliner (even purchased it) and reported that I found that it worked great. I am continuing to use Tabs Outliner daily and am quite happy with it. YMMV, and I've never tried Session Buddy.

Tabs Outliner doesn'

Re: Session Buddy?

[crobarcro]

Read the summary all the way to the end and you might get what the OP is talking about. They suggest session buddy as an alternative

Re: Session Buddy?

[BAReFO0t]

Have you seriously never heard of bookmark folders?

I'm sure your browser supports saving an entire window's tabs as a bookmark folder in under two clicks.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

I use Session Buddy.

I eat yoghurt. What does either of these two things have to do with The Great Suspender containing malware?

Re:

[PingSpike]

Probably has something to do with the article summary. Not sure about your yogurt thing, maybe it helps with your gut biome.

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

That's the great pretender. Different department.

klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg

[Stolovaya]

Great idea for a safe word!

Re:klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg

[Megane]

Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious.

Re:

[Briareos]

Try making other sounds while wearing a gag...

Re:

[ZERO1ZERO]

hey that's the combination of my luggage how did you know

Or

[ArchieBunker]

Just hear me out for a minute here. Maybe you don't need to have 1000 tabs open?

Re:

[The MAZZTer]

Chrome actually suspends tabs for you if you don't use them and it needs to free up memory. Not sure if there's really a reason to use an extension, unless you obsess over how much memory Chrome uses. (Hint: It's using it for your TABS.) If you don't want it to use so much memory, take some RAM out of your PC. RAM is wasted if apps don't use it, so if they have a use for it they should and will make use of it. If you successfully keep your PC from using more than 6GB of your 8GB RAM, good for you I guess, b

Re:

[Travelsonic]

RAM is wasted if apps don't use it

I don't understand. How is it "wasted"? I assume we are talking about memory that is unallocated to a particular task? I mean, other programs can still get access to unallocated memory the O/S can use it for caching and the like, and depending on the means of divvying up that memory, you will have. What am I missing?

Re: Or

[IdanceNmyCar]

You are missing that the modern OS outlines pre-loading to be equivalent to avoiding waste...

I currently have some nasty memory issues on my win 10 laptop. It has been fine for years but either an insider build or something is now eating all the memory and filling up the swap... I even toyed a bit with the swap. It slowly effects software before a hard crash. I have a feeling, it's related to a bad implementation of pre loading as no new software was installed which should cause such a destructive memory

Re:

[Travelsonic]

I guess what I am also missing is how "waste" is being defined here.
Thanks for putting up with my derpy-assed questions. XD

Re: Or

[IdanceNmyCar]

It's fair. The language is a bit obscure. It seems to come primarily from phones where pre loading apps became commonplace but even a modern OS, seems to put a lot of memory into"standby".

My expertise is neither in electronics or OS design but it may come from the fact that pre loading can reduce load times while not requiring much power. The gist being the "energy cost" of ram of ram is for writes. Therefore if you can predictively load into ram, the cost is the same as on demand but increased responsi

Re:

[Travelsonic]

I wonder then, let's assume that is correct, I wonder if at least part of the problem would then become the way they predict potential memory needs (or even if they bother to predict at all), in the general scope of programs that have dynamic memory requirements (for the purpose of this post, I'll define that as when a program's needs can change rather drastically over the course of runtime).
What makes the language even more confusing, IMO, is when it is applied not to a mobile platform (where I feel, fro

Re:

[Lonewolf666]

Obviously a lot depends the algorithm for freeing up of memory that is merely filled with pre-loaded data. And I would not trust the majority of software developers to put serious effort in that part, or merely cooperate with the OS to do it well.

On the contrary, over the years more and more software installs a pre-loader by default, which pre-loads the software even before the user decided to use it in that session. When it happened the first time with some version of Office, people were not enthusuastic a

Re:

[invictusvoyd]

You are missing that the modern OS outlines pre-loading to be equivalent to avoiding waste... I currently have some nasty memory issues on my win 10 laptop.

er .. You said Modern OS ..

Re:

[randjh]

I guess nobody here runs virtual machines on a Linux box. I can be surfing around, and then suddenly need to run a Win app. Oops. Now everything's at a crawl becuase there isn't enough RAM in my 8GB system for all my browser tabs and my VM.

I'd rather cut the browser mem temporarily specifying what browser windows I'm willing to put on hold, run my VM session, close it down, and let my tabs migate back as I use them. Anyone have any idea of a more-or-less seamless way to do that?

Re: Or

[BAReFO0t]

Uum, my phone's 3-6GB did just fine. Don't be a hoarder.

Re:

[sabbede]

Yes, but that's a fairly new feature for chromium browsers. The extensions may be obsolete/redundant now, but a few months ago they weren't.

Reading List extension

[raymorris]

For me, I used tabs (lot of them) for sites I expect to go back to in a day or so, which might well turn into a week or so. I use bookmarks for longer term, more permanent stuff.

Keeping a ton of pages open that I might look at a week from now *is* really wasteful of RAM. So I've been using a reading list extension. It makes it very quick and easy to add and remove things from my reading list, without keeping the site open for a week.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

"Doctor, it hurts when I do this."

"Then don't do that."

Re:

[rnturn]

Maybe you don't need to have 1000 tabs open?

Clearly you've never tried to research a Jira problem using their wiki.

Re: Or

[BAReFO0t]

Do you just select the entire page, right click, and go "open all links in tabs", for all pagesy every pagey or what?

I don't see how anyone would ever need more than 8*8 tabs (for opening lists) and usually only 8 tabs (in normal usage).

Re:

[randjh]

I don't see how anyone would ever need more than 8*8 tabs (for opening lists) and usually only 8 tabs (in normal usage).

Sounds llike you don't research any difficult problems where there are tantalizing hints sprinkled all over the web.

Re:

[Mozai]

It only takes one badly-behaving tab using off-the-shelf or hosted-by-google javascript libraries leaking memory to ruin things for all the others.

As a user of TGS...

[cloud.pt]

I am tantalized by the fact this news was out by November 20th, and only now did it get sorted. I'm also worried regarding Google's policy of allowing public store publisher credential exchanges without any validation or pre-authorization. Makes me wonder how many popular Google Play Store have had the exact same problem - which is a much larger-audience, sweeter of a honey-pot for malicious takeovers.

decentralised panopticon

[cas2000]

Hooray! Yet another shitty fucking day in the shithole decentralised panopticon(*) that is the modern internet.

If you're not paranoid and hyper-vigilant every fucking second of every fucking day then something that you thought was "relatively safe" and had used for years is suddenly yet another piece of fucking spyware shit. and even being hypervigilant doesn't prevent it - it just means you find out about a little sooner...but still after the fucking fact.

It's just fucking exhausting.

I fucking hate what the internet has become. and it's only going to get worse and worse.

"decentralised panopticon": constant 86400+ seconds / 24*7 surveillance - but not just by ONE entity (prison guard or employer or government etc) but by thousands, or millions, of shonky fucking businesses and governments and TLAs (and whoever-the-fuck-else wants to do it) spying on everyone all the time.

Re:

[Waccoon]

Even better is that most of the "extensions" we use are to make up for the lack of obvious, essential features that should be built into the browser by default. But, they're not, to reduce "bloat."

I miss the Internet of the 90's, when it was largely run by colleges and universities, and before JavaScript enabled the hell that was pop-unders.

If you're ever using more than 6-9 tabs ...

[BAReFO0t]

... and they are not a list (like, say, you opened a bunch of images or articles to go through),

then for the love of yourself, stop using tabs like bookmarks, and use bookmarks! With folders adhering to the same rule. (Make a sub-folder otherwise.)

Don't be a tab hoarder. It only wastes your time and your computer's RAM.

Re:

[Vomitgod]

"It only wastes your time and your computer's RAM." ....internet nobody telling people how to browse the internet....

Re:

[geekmux]

"It only wastes your time and your computer's RAM." ....internet nobody telling people how to browse the internet....

"Don't become an alcoholic. It only wastes your time and harms others."

Yeah, heaven forbid Common F. Sense stands up every now and then to advise the average idiot...

Re: If you're ever using more than 6-9 tabs ...

[uhvuhvuhv]

Why would I create a bookmark for something I'm only going to keep around for a few hours? I can pull up 100 tabs before noon if I'm really getting into whatever I'm working on. Close all those out and have 100 new ones by dinner. Although, the javadocs aren't quite as cpu/memory intensive as freeshit.malware.rs or wherever the average joe(anne) spends their time on the interwebs these days

Re:

[mysidia]

Too late... And the reason I don't use bookmarks so much is: is because bookmarks fail with two major deficiencies.

(1) A bookmark does not allow me to return the original page if it has been changed or deleted after I added the bookmark but before I returned to it. It's not too rare... I might click a bookmark to find the page is now gone or changed, Or there's new annoying advertising, or a new annoying
overlay that detects AdBlockers and hides the content, Or there's new "extr a hoops" the

Re:

[Ingenium13]

The problem with bookmarks is that I will never go back through them again. I use tabs almost as a reminder, or a note. When they get too full, it forces me to go back through them and either determine if I still need the tab, or to do whatever it was a reminder to do.

it's sort of the same reason that I use /tmp so much. Basically any download goes to /tmp. Most things that I need to disk only need to be kept for less than an hour. Rather than continually cleaning up a work folder, I just let the OS clean i

It's "including me" not "including myself"

[shibbie]

Sorry (not sorry). I finding it irritating when people use the reflexive pronoun and they are not the subject of the sentence (the extension is). It's almost as bad as writing "including I". Please learn the difference, as it is quite jarring to those of us who read technical documentation for a living.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

"'Myself' means the same thing as 'me' but it makes you sound smarter."

- American Idiot

Re:

[geekmux]

Sorry (not sorry). I finding it irritating when people use the reflexive pronoun and they are not the subject of the sentence (the extension is). It's almost as bad as writing "including I". Please learn the difference, as it is quite jarring to those of us who read technical documentation for a living.

Canada officially recognizes over 50 gendered pronouns, and unofficially we're up to 112 genders now. [dudeasks.com]

If me, myself, and I are quite jarring for you, how the hell have you not bludgened yourself to death by now with a thesaurus?

The Real Story.

[geekmux]

Google was losing revenue by not being able to run *their* trackers in the background of memory-hogging tabs, so they destroyed the competition, and forcefully brought the product (you) back into their revenue stream.

Enjoy.

Re:

[Canberra1]

You may be right. That would imply advertisers could be mislead over impression time on inactive tabs, and pay more, for no benefit whatsoever. In 2nd year CS operating systems were taught. For IBM Mainframe MVS you could choose the paging algorithm, LFU, TTL, by storage pools, by ASID, TCB - no user intervention required. The improvements like dirty pages and page stealing. On Fijitsu OSIV they first invented DSECT's that could be shared. One looks at toy operating systems and think - do they actually tea