Managing tabs in a browser doesn’t have to suck. ![]() Address the problem at its root and get organized. I know that for many of you, The Great Suspender holds a special place in your heart as you’ve used it for so long, but their shiny new coat of paint can’t excuse the mismanagement and abuse of user data.If you have so many tabs open that your computer is slowing down, you don’t need a tab suspender or tab snoozer - you need a tab manager. I, myself, still use things like Toby, which has a better interface and more modern features, but Google really is starting to bake a lot of these things right into the browser nowadays, so I’m a big fan of that. ![]() For the majority of users, having a tool for this built right into Chrome out of the box makes it something they just pick up and use. Ever since Chrome 87 has made significant improvements to performance and memory management, Google released their popular Tab Groups feature and even added freezing and collapsing capabilities to them, tab management extensions have drastically fallen in popularity. We probably won’t find out whether or not The Great Suspender was actually compromised or simply mishandled, but what is clear is that many Chrome users have already moved on. Needless to say, we’re all becoming quite weary of these types of situations and it needs to stop. All of this comes as 15 Chrome extensions were recently found to be abusing their userbase and stealing their data. Google recently declared war on the free reign that extensions have had on user data and has a plan for 2021 to force developers to be more transparent by issuing a ‘seal of approval’ for those that follow strict guidelines about how they’re utilizing a user’s data. The concern here is that while this mysterious new owner is just using additional tracking for analytics in the extension, it could potentially be used for malicious intent, especially since it’s using suspicious code from other suspicious extensions. He said he suspects the owner intends to wait for the online controversy to die down and then subvert the code through further changes. The Register interviewed a developer named Josh Manders from Primacloud, a CRM and reporting company, and he stated that as he dug into the source code of The Great Suspender, numerous links to other extensions that had been purchased from developers and repurposed as malware were present within. Some users claim that these two versions of The Great Suspender include code that’s consistent with malware or crypto mining extensions! Wait, what? Okay, slow down here for a second – is this popular and well-known extension stealing user data? Well, it’s we can’t know for sure since no malicious behavior has been detected so far, but the fact that these analytics tools and scripts have even been injected into the extension and since it was pushed to user’s devices automatically, still makes it suspicious. In English, this means that without a user’s consent, their data may have been siphoned out from under their noses. Worse still is that after several experienced users did some digging in those version’s code they found that The Great Suspender was utilizing something pretending to be Open Web Analytics (OWA) (used for tracking) and remote scripts that would be run via a content delivery network (CDN).
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