The Great Suspender: a popular plugin removed from Chrome

Today, 4 February 2021, Google forcibly and without warning disabled the The Great Suspender extension and recommended removing it from every browser on the Chrome engine. When the plugin was blocked, all the tabs that had been unloaded from memory disappeared from users' browsers. 

A change of owner and suspicious changes

As it turned out, the popular plugin for suspending unused tabs and saving memory had changed project lead back in the summer. After that, the developers involved in the project began noticing suspicious changes. Their investigation showed that the extension had started tracking users' requests and making additional advertising requests. It is by no means certain that its suspicious activity ended there.

Immediately after the block, a thread appeared on Reddit, the world's largest forum, discussing the plugin, possible replacements for it and ways to recover lost tabs.

How to recover The Great Suspender's tabs

In some cases the tabs that disappeared from browsers can still be recovered. To do that:

1. Open the browser history and find the string "klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg" in it. The URL will look rather strange, something like chrome-extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/suspended.html#ttl=Google&uri=https://www.google.com
2. Delete the whole front part of the URL that the extension added, everything up to and including "&uri="

What can replace The Great Suspender?

As things stand, Reddit users recommend these alternatives to the plugin:

1. The Marvelous Suspender, an open source fork of the original plugin taken at the moment the project changed hands
2. Auto Tab Discard
3. One Tab

We would recommend removing the disabled plugin from the browser and, if needed, replacing it either with one from that list or with another alternative. And not forgetting that even excellent projects sometimes fall into the wrong hands, so it is always worth keeping up with the news and the trends. 

Stay safe.