Google has coercively uninstalled the immensely famous ‘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 empty its resources to decrease the browser’s memory usage. At the point when a user is prepared to use the tab once more, they simply needed to click it on to make it visible.
This extension was immensely famous with more than 2,000,000 users and has consistently been a prescribed extension because of its capacity to lessen Chrome’s memory usage.
At the point when Google eliminated it on Thursday, users were left with a message stating that “This extension contains malware,” however not giving any further setting on the best way to recuperate their suspended tabs or why they eliminated it.
With the unexpected expulsion of The Great Suspender extension, users who had suspended tabs were upset that they couldn’t access them once more.
It is possible to see a list of suspended tabs through Chrome’s inherent History highlight and use that list to recuperate the URL of the suspended page.
Instructions on the best way to do this, as well as other methods, can be found on this support page.
In June 2020, the designer of The Great Suspender sold the extension to an obscure amount as he didn’t have the opportunity to appropriately maintain it.
At that point, users were suspicious of the sale was suspicious as to why someone would purchase a free open-source extension that didn’t produce any income for the engineer.
As free extensions have been purchased in the past and afterward adapted with malicious changes, such as infusing ads or stealing data, users were concerned the same would occur with The Great Suspender.
Sadly, the user’s concerns were justified when the new owner updated the extension in October 2020 to release version 7.1.8, which included scripts that followed the user’s conduct and executed code recovered from a far off server.
This malicious action prompted Microsoft eliminating the Microsoft Edge Store extension and another 7.1.9 version to be released without the malicious scripts.
The extension, however, kept on leftover in the hands of these obscure developers, who could present malicious code sometime in the future, possibly without users’ noticing.
On Thursday, Google pulled the Chrome Web Store extension as malware yet has not given any reason to doing as such. It is not satisfactory if Google discovered extra malicious scripts or responded to its history and the local area’s concerns.
For those who genuinely need to use The Great Suspender extension, the GitHub project page continues to offer version 7.1.6, which is the last release of the extension when claimed by the first engineer and does not contain malicious scripts.
To install the extension, you should do as such through Chrome’s developer mode, which is not suggested as it removes the security benefits offered by Google’s extension survey process.
