Google reportedly blocked the popular extension The Great Suspender and removed it from the Chrome Web Store because it contained malware. But if you were one of the many users who relied on the tab manager to keep your browser running smoothly, still don’t panic. You can still you will be able to recover your lost tabs thanks to an alternative solution discovered by the extension community.
On Thursday, users began receiving notifications that The Great Suspender was “disabled because it contains malware.” The extension, which has been installed over 2 million times before turning it off, it would force any tabs you don’t currently use to sleep, replacing them with a gray screen until you come back and restart them with a click. This way, you could keep a billion tabs open without Google’s browser hiding your device’s memory and potentially slowing down performance.
However, I feel like some are asking you: Couldn’t you have fewer tabs open in general and would that solve the problem as well? And for that, my four dozen tabs of articles I’ll probably never read and I ask you to leave that logic to you, thank you very much.
Last year, The Great Suspender moved into a new management, and it looks like this is where the problems started. Its creator, Dean Oemcke, sold the extension to an unknown third party in June, and later version updates included an exploit that could be used to silently execute any type of code on users’ devices without their consent, for the record. Microsoft Edge has already kicked off The Great Suspender from its extension market after the discovery of this feat, and it now appears that Google has followed suit.
If you’ve used the extension and want to recover your tabs now that it’s turned off, you’re in luck. The extension community found a promising, albeit annoying, solution to reviving your lost lashes. Simply navigate to the browser history (navigate to chrome: // history or press Ctrl-H while in the browser) and search for the extension ID: “klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg”.
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This will show all the suspended tabs, and at the end of the absurdly long URL of each result is the actual address of the tab you had open. If you first delete all badges, you should keep the URL of the page you are on. So if the URL starts with “https: //”, deleting everything before it would provide you with the URL of the suspended tab.
It’s tedious, sure, but better than just saying “RIP” to all the tabs you had before disabling the extension. The developers of Google and The Great Suspender did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.