Google took down popular extension The Great Suspender due to malware

The Great Suspender had previously been warned about malware.

What you need to know

• The Chrome Webstore has taken down its listing for The Great Suspender after flagging the extension for malware.
• The Great Suspender was an extension that reduced memory usage when users had many tabs open on their Chrome browser, which could be resource-heavy.
• The extension is being disabled on users’ browsers. This follows claims that the software was sold to a company that used it for malicious purposes.

The Great Suspender is a popular web extension for the Chrome web browser that allows users to put tabs to sleep. It was particularly useful for those of you who tend to keep many tabs open at once, as Chrome is known to be quite resource-heavy. It seems the extension has been disabled from users’ computers and pulled from the Chrome Webstore after being flagged for malware.

The extension has apparently been under some heat since mid-2020 when the developer reportedly sold the software, with many users claiming that the company embedded tracking software within the extension. There’s an entire post on Reddit that explains the entire saga, but something fishy had been going on with the new software, and there were official warnings as far back as November.

We’ve reached out but so far have received no comment from the developer. For now, you’re looking for other ways to put your tabs to sleep there are plenty of useful extensions on the Chrome Webstore or GitHub. You might be better off trying out some of the best Chrome for desktop alternatives, some of which have features that can put tabs to sleep. Vivaldi, for example, has a hibernation feature, and Microsoft Edge also allows users to put inactive tabs to sleep.