Google disables Great Suspender extension, says it ‘contains malware’

The Great Suspender just got expelled. 

Users of the popular tab-management extension for Chrome were greeted with an unwelcome message from Google Thursday, alerting them to the fact that their beloved add-on may have had ulterior motives. Specifically, Chrome warned that the Great Suspender “contains malware.”

The message was accompanied by a semi-cleaving of the extension from Chrome, and a loss of all of users’ suspended tabs along with it. 

We reached out to Google, which owns the Chrome browser, for details on the supposed malware but received no immediate response. As of the time of this writing, attempting to pull up the Great Suspender in the Chrome Web Store leads to an error page. 

However, this was not the first alert about the apparently sketchy extension. In early January, the Register, a tech news publication, reported on Great Suspender concerns dating back to November. Around that same time, Microsoft Edge blocked the extension.

That message clearly didn’t get through to many of the apps’ fans, though, at least some of whom are now mourning their lost tabs. 

And while losing tabs may be temporarily annoying, somehow we think they’ll recover.