Google has reportedly blocked and removed the popular extension The Great Suspender from the 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 just yet. YOU can still can recover your lost tabs thanks to a temporary solution discovered by the extension’s community.
On Thursday, users began to receive reports that The Great Suspender was “disabled for containing malware.” The extension, which is installed over 2 million times before it turned off, any tabs you weren’t using at the time would hibernate, replacing them with a gray screen until you came back and restarting them with a click. That way, you can still keep a zillion number of tabs open without Google’s browser taking up your device’s memory and potentially slowing down performance.
But, I hear some of you ask, couldn’t you just have fewer tabs open in general and that would also solve the problem? And on that, my four dozen tabs of articles I’ll probably never read and I’m asking you to keep that logic to yourself, thank you very much.
Last year, The Great Suspender came under new management, and that’s where the problems seem to have 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 quietly run almost any type of code on users’ devices without their consent, per the register. Microsoft Edge has already kicked The Great Suspender off its extension market after the discovery of this exploit, and now it appears that Google has followed suit.
If you’ve used the extension and want to restore your tabs now that it’s disabled, you’re in luck. The extension’s community has found a promising, albeit tedious, solution to give new life to your lost tabs. Simply go to your browser history – navigate to chrome: // history or press Ctrl-H in the browser – and look for the extension ID: “klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg”.
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That will bring up all of your suspended tabs, and at the very end of each result’s absurdly long URL will be the actual address of the tab you had opened. If you removed all the nonsense before that, you should have the URL of the page you were on. So if the URL starts with “https: //”, removing everything before that should give the URL for your suspended tab.
It’s annoying, of course, but better than simply saying “RIP” on every tab you had before the extension was disabled. The developers of Google and The Great Suspender did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.