Google removes ‘The Great Suspender’ extension from Chrome

Google's Chrome is undeniably the most feature-rich browser in the world, but it has one bad attribute that annoys a lot of users. No matter how top-end PC you buy, it tends to become slow, as it hogs a lot of RAM.

To mitigate this issue, users to tend install extensions, which promises better speed with Chrome. Among many, The Great Suspender (TGS) is a widely used utility tool for Chrome browsers on PCs. However, it has come to light that the TGS application has been compromised with malicious codes. Apparently, the original TGS owner solid it to an unknown bidder and the latter might have injected nefarious codes to perform remote executions on users' PCs.

(Note: An extension is a type of tool made for modifying core functionality, in this case, TGS for Chrome, to improve the user experience and related speed of response such as swapping of tabs and loading websites.)

In fact, this issue was flagged way bay in November 2020 on GitHub, but it comes to light only now. Google has removed The Great Suspender and will no longer appear on the Chrome web store. Now, the result for the TGS search shows a 404 error.

"The old (The Great Suspender) 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. After Microsoft removed it from Edge for malware, v7.1.9 was created without this code: that has been the code running since November, and it does not appear to load the compromised script. The malicious maintainer remains in control, however, and can introduce an update at any time. Well, they could until Google nuked the extension from their store."-- reads the GitHub message.

With the TGS extension gone, users can shift to other alternatives including One Tab, Tab Outliner, Session Buddy, Auto Tab Discard, Dustman, TooManyTabs, and The Great Discarder, among others.

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