If you're a Google Chrome user, and you were using 'The Great Suspender" to minimize the amount of memory your unused tabs occupy, well, you were hit by an interesting surprise.
I popped open Chrome and I received the message, that The Great Suspender has been blocked because "This extension contains malware."
Wait. What???
Turns out that this Chrome extension had changed hands and in November of 2020, it was suspected that the new owners had apparently inserted some 'nefarious code."
Per a GitHub post:
"The old maintainer appears to have sold the extension to parties unknown, who have malicious intent to exploit the users of this extension in advertising fraud, tracking, and more. In v7.1.8 of the extension (published to the web store but NOT to GitHub), arbitrary code was executed from a remote server, which appeared to be used to commit a variety of tracking and fraud actions."
I'm a little pissed that it took Google THIS LONG to actually kill it in my browser, it's what, early February?
But now, on the same GitHub post they talk about how you can get your old urls back if they're now stuck in limbo because of the extension being nerfed.
"Some others have had success simply pressing the "back" button on suspended tabs: everyone should note that the site's URL is included in the URL of the suspended page."
GO TO THE GitHub page for details on recovering tabs if the 'back' button doesn't work.
The details on what happened is also at the GitHub link and they do seem pretty insidious.
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What can you do now?
After you've recovered your tabs, (or not), you have a few options to replace it or... you know, maybe you can not have so many tabs open...
Keep in mind that most modern-day browsers already do a good job keeping track of things. Chrome has 'Tab Freeze' already part of it's core, where it frees up memory your tabs are using after about five minutes of inactivity on that tab.
But if you need to replace it,
You can check out Session Buddy, OneTab or Tabs Outliner in the app store.
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