satnami / thegreatsuspender

A chrome extension for suspending all tabs to free up memory

The Great Suspender

Read this if you have lost tabs from your browser

I have written a guide for how to recover your lost tabs here: greatsuspender#526

Please contribute if you have any extra insight on alternative methods for tab recovery.

Welcome

"The Great Suspender" is a free and open-source Google Chrome extension for people who find that chrome is consuming too much system resource or suffer from frequent chrome crashing. Once installed and enabled, this extension will automatically suspend tabs that have not been used for a while, freeing up memory and cpu that the tab was consuming.

If you have suggestions or problems using the extension, please submit a bug or a feature request.

Chrome Web Store

The Great Suspender is also available via the official Chrome Web Store.

Please note that the webstore version may be significantly behind the latest version here. That is because I try to keep webstore updates down to a minimum due to their disruptive effect.

For more information on the permissions required for the extension, please refer to this gitHub issue: (greatsuspender#213)

Install as an extension from source

1. Download the latest available version and unarchive to your preferred location (whichever suits you).
2. Using Google Chrome browser, navigate to chrome://extensions/ and enable "Developer mode" in the upper right corner.
3. Click on the Load unpacked extension... button.
4. Browse to the src directory of the downloaded, unarchived release and confirm.

If you have completed the above steps, the "welcome" page will open indicating successful installation of the extension.

Build from github

Dependencies: openssl, npm.

Clone the repository and run these commands:

npm install
npm run generate-key
npm run build

It should say:

Done, without errors.

The extension in crx format will be inside the build/crx/ directory. You can drag it into [extensions] (chrome://extensions) to install locally.

License

This work is licensed under a GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE (v2)

Shoutouts

This package uses the html2canvas library written by Niklas von Hertzen.
It also uses the indexedDb wrapper db.js written by Aaron Powell.
Thank you also to BrowserStack for providing free chrome testing tools.