Reminder to self: pointers to recovering “The Great Suspender” suspended URLs (after in 2021 Google booted it from Chrome for being malware)
Posted by jpluimers on 2023/12/14
I was a long term user of “The Great Suspender”. It was a cool little Chrome Extension that would auto-suspend Chrome tabs that had not been used for a while and resume them when the tab did get accessed again thereby greatly reducing the horrible Chrome CPU and memory footprints.
During my year+ long treatment against metastasised rectum cancer I had suspended or hibernated most of my physical and virtual machines. So there was not just the surprised during the recovery of those that The Great Suspender had been kicked of the Chrome extensions, but also the problem of getting all the suspended tabs back of machines that eventually would be awoken out of sleep: I keep tabs open on stuff that I was working on or investigating for future blog posts, so these somehow could be important.
For now, I am not using anything as a replacement just to experience how well Chrome has evolved to suspend inactive tabs itself.
Now Chrome seems to do this well, as this post is based on an old VM that I have now unsuspended which had [Wayback/Archive] “the great suspender” “malware” – Google Search and the below links open in a mid-February 2021 state but not all archived in the Wayback Machine or Archive.is (some I did archived in February-May 2021).
The links are about why it got removed, how to recover lost suspended tabs and a possible alternative in case current Chrome suspend behaviour is not good enough.
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- [Wayback/Archive] Google just booted The Great Suspender from Chrome for being malware
- [Wayback/Archive] Upcoming changes to the management of The Great Suspender · Issue #1175 · greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender: a 2020 issue some 4 months before the trackers were introduced in version 7.1.8.
- [Wayback/Archive] Recovering lost tabs after extension update or removal · Issue #526 · greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender a 2017 issue, but with important steps in recovering recover tabs from The Great Suspender:
This is the official issue for users trying to recover from tab loss due to an update of the extension, or following removal/disabling of the extension.
- [Wayback/Archive] Chrome is blocking The Great Suspender, here’s how to get your tabs back – The Verge
If you used the extension and are looking to get your tabs back, the steps are simple, if a bit tedious. If the tabs were open, you can go to them and click into the URL bar. There will be a ton of text that looks something like this:
chrome-extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg/suspended.html#ttl=%22Dawn%22%20Dario%20Marianelli%20(Pride%20%26%20Prejudice)%20Piano%20solo%20%26%20Tutorial%20-%20P.%20Barton%20-%20YouTube&pos=0&uri=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJXGLl_sEDUAt the end will be the address for the page you were on. Deleting everything before the URL and hitting enter will bring the page back to life.
Reddit user avatar_ENG also discovered you can still get those tabs back by searching your Chrome history. It’s basically the same process as above: you search for the extension’s ID, klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg, then open the tabs and remove the junk. It may be an annoying process, but it’s better than losing any work or incredible memes you had open.
- The first bit is remarkably similar to what I described in Decode URLs from The Great Suspender after a browser restart fails to reload them and has a decoder hosted at Decode URLs from The Great Suspender after a browser restart fails to reload them.Since you cannot run bookmarklets on those “pages to be decoded” (as they are technically not in a “loaded” state by Chrome), I cannot turn that into a bookmarklet.
- The second bit I need to think about automating somehow: hopefully a Bookmarklet can read Chrome history and just automagically convert the URLs starting with
chrome-extension://klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg.I might want to include “The Marvelous Suspender” (see below) there as well and find+decode URLs containingnoogafoofpebimajpfpamcfhoaifemoa.
- [Wayback/Archive] Mishaal Rahman on Twitter: “I uninstalled it as soon as I posted that tweet last month, so I didn’t get the notification. I haven’t looked for an alternative yet, but there’s supposedly an open-source fork of TGS before it added tracking.”
[Wayback/Archive] The Marvellous Suspender – Chrome Web Store (alternative forked from The Great Suspender right before the trackers were included):
- [Wayback/Archive] URGENT: SECURITY: New maintainer is probably malicious · Issue #1263 · greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender
- [Wayback/Archive] The Marvellous Suspender: Hello World!
[Wayback/Archive] gioxx/MarvellousSuspender: A chrome extension for suspending all tabs to free up memory, based on the original TGS 7.1.6, without tracking. Find more information about that on https://gioxx.org/tms
- [Wayback/Archive] Mishaal Rahman on Twitter: “I was about to see if The Great Suspender’s review score had plummeted, but it looks like Google has gone ahead and removed the extension: …” / Twitter
- [Wayback/Archive] Mishaal Rahman on Twitter: “RIP to a great extension. ” / Twitter
[Wayback/Archive] Mishaal Rahman on Twitter: “According to a bunch of users on Reddit, Chrome is now warning people that The Great Suspender is malware. The extension is being automatically uninstalled, and users are losing a bunch of suspended tabs in the process. Source: https://t.co/iXL3WdJQAp… https://t.co/Usim0K5Ykq”
- [Wayback/Archive] WARNING: Please immediately UNINSTALL The Great Suspender as it now contains tracking code that could try and grab your passwords. : chrome
- [Wayback/Archive] Mishaal Rahman on Twitter: “Yikes. Seems The Great Suspender isn’t a great extension to have installed anymore.”
[Wayback/Archive] What happens when a Chrome extension with 2m+ users changes hands, raises red flags, doesn’t document updates? Let’s find out • The Register
[Wayback/Archive] URGENT: SECURITY: New maintainer is probably malicious · Issue #1263 · greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender
The above “The Great Suspender” extension code also reveals quite a few links at [Wayback/Archive] klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg – Google Search.
Here are some of my blog posts describing why I liked The Great Suspender so much from back in the days that Chrome didn’t do this by itself:
- Chrome will pause plugin content (e.g. Flash animations) to improve battery…
- Mac: Google Chrome Helper excessive CPU usage
- Decode URLs from The Great Suspender after a browser restart fails to reload them
- If you use Session Buddy, you might want to reconsider: it only saves the session infrequently
- When +Google Nederland maps only fills one or part of the map tiles…
- Some experience of htmlpreview.github.io as a replacement for rawgit.com
And here some links that might be useful when trying to restore all these after unsuspending the machines:
- [Wayback/Archive] Trying to restore previous session, but no Last Session/Tabs files in Google Chrome folder. : chrome
Something seems to have changed in Chromium version 86–“
Current Tabs“, “Current Session“, “Last Session“, and “Last Tabs” all seem to have been replaced by the directories “Sessions” and “Session Storage“. I can’t find this documented anywhere, this is just what I found exploring the “User Data\Default” directory. I don’t know if this will help you restore your tabs or not.Via [Wayback/Archive] chrome “current session” “2021” – Google Search.
- There is now no easy way to recover from a numeric session ID directory as the ID numbers are random: [Wayback/Archive] Restore last session, last tabs after crash – Google Chrome Community
- [Wayback/Archive] FYI Google Chrome changed how last sessions are ma… – VMware Technology Network VMTN via [Wayback/Archive] “Google/Chrome/Default/Sessions” – Google Search
–jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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