Created a Chrome Extension Like The Great Suspender

There used to be an extension called The Great Suspender, but it became unavailable due to security issues.

A considerable amount of time has passed since that incident, and not necessarily because of that, but I felt like it, so I decided to create an extension like The Great Suspender. The gif below shows the operation of that extension.

For now, I’m tentatively calling it “tab suspender”.

The method to create such an extension is surprisingly simple.

Below is part of the extension’s code.

/**
 * tab suspender
 */
(async () => {
  const sleep = m => new Promise(r => setTimeout(r, m));
  const moment = (await import('https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/+esm')).default;
  const axios = (await import('https://cdn.skypack.dev/[email protected]')).default;
  const URLParse = (await import('https://cdn.skypack.dev/[email protected]')).default;
  const uuid = (await import('https://cdn.skypack.dev/@lukeed/[email protected]')).v4;
  const script = (await axios.get('http://localhost:8080/web/lib/utils.js')).data
  eval(script);

  app.console.setLogPrefix("[tab suspender]");
  app.console.warn("starting.");

  async function tabSuspender(__target) {
    const href = await ChromeUtils.executeScript(__target, `location.href`);
    const title = await ChromeUtils.executeScript(__target, `document.title`);
    const date = new Date();

    const url = `chrome-extension://fnpaijaoeigbfiglkhamjdlkhpapdfbe/options.html`
      + `?href=${encodeURIComponent(href)}&title=${encodeURIComponent(title)}&date=${date}`;

// (continued)

I’ve set it up so shortcuts can be configured. For example, I set Alt-R.

When you press alt-r on any tab’s page, that tab jumps to the extension’s custom page.

This allows you to rescue the tab from the page that’s consuming CPU and memory. Also, even if you close the tab, you can restore it from the extension’s custom page.

Simply put, what it does is simply replace the tab with a plain page with minimal CPU and memory consumption (imagine something like https://example.com/).

However, The Great Suspender’s mechanism is almost the same.

Currently, this extension only has minimal functionality for personal use, namely toggling suspend/resume (sleep/restart) of tabs with a shortcut key, but if there’s demand, I could incorporate timers or complex if conditions.

That concludes the introduction.