Chrome extension The Great Suspender removed from store due to possible malware

[German]A few hours ago, Google removed the popular Chrome browser extension The Great Suspender from the browser extensions web store. The reason is probably that this extension installed malware on users' systems.

Extension The Great Suspender

Those who opened a lot of tabs in Google Chrome browser noticed that they consumed a lot of RAM and also processing power. This is exactly the problem that the Chrome browser extension The Great Suspender promised to solve. The extension allows you to suspend the tabs so that they do not consume any memory.

I've had discussed this extensionen in 2017 within the German blog post Google Chrome, den Speicherfresser zähmen. Worldwide there are probably around 2 million users. Since this extension led to display problems (see my German blog post Google Chrome zeigt keine Tweets mehr an) I have kicked this extension again. Currently I use the Ungoogled browser without extensions, so I don't notice any changes to the extensions. 

The Great Suspender kicked out of web store

Last year the developer of the extension changed, as you can read in this GitHub post. There is a note there that the browser extension can now potentially install malware on the target system. Starting with version 7.1.8, an exploit was added to the code of The Great Suspender extension that could execute almost any type of code on a user's computer without their knowledge.

Microsoft had already responded to this exploit by removing the extension from the Microsoft Edge extensions web store. Google had left The Great Suspender extension in the Chrome Web Store, as a later update reportedly removed the exploit. As reported by various media outlets, including The Verge, Google has now removed The Great Suspender extension from the Chrome Web Store. At the same time, The Great Suspender has been forcibly disabled on all systems where the extension was installed in Chrome.

Unfortunately, this forced disabling of the extension has resulted in all suspended tabs being closed and lost for active users of The Great Suspender. However, the extension's community has found a way to potentially retrieve the lost tabs. Simply open chrome://history – you can also open this by pressing Ctrl-H in Chrome – and search for The Great Suspender's extension ID: "klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg." Each result should be a tab that was suspended. At the end of each URL is the address of the lost web page.