thegreatsuspender VS auto-tab-discard

Happened in (2021)[https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1...], and then a few others have forked the extension and tried to revive it, only to eventually sell to nefarious owners or sell user data themselves

I went to github and downloaded the last known "good version, installed it manually."

You want someone to die for disabling a potentially malicious extension that is unmantained since 2020?

Also if you want to read up on the removal of the app and the malware issues this post goes over it as well as other recovery options

Similar code projects have had issues like this before, like the open source Great Suspender.

What can happen after a project changes hands - https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1263

Better link https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1...

> TLDR: The old maintainer appears to have sold the extension to parties unknown, who have malicious intent to exploit the users of this extension in advertising fraud, tracking, and more. In v7.1.8 of the extension (published to the web store but NOT to GitHub), arbitrary code was executed from a remote server, which appeared to be used to commit a variety of tracking and fraud actions. After Microsoft removed it from Edge for malware, v7.1.9 was created without this code: that has been the code distributed by the web store since November, and it does not appear to load the compromised script. However, the malicious maintainer remains in control, however, and can introduce an update at any time. It further appears that, while v7.1.9 was what was listed on the store, those who had the hostile v7.1.8 installed did NOT automatically receive the malware-removing update, and continued running the hostile code until Google force-disabled the extension.

For what it is worth, you may have heard of the Great Suspender incident (https://github.com/greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender/issues/1263). It was used by millions, and was also open source on GitHub, but it could still end up becoming malicious.

Long ass comment: That is not true for the most part. While the increased amount of individuals working of an OSS project may lead to better vulnerability detection according to both parties of the closed-source/proprietary debate, it doesn't lead to a massively more secure software overall. Not all reviewers have the similar experience or expertise and, because of it, not everyone will be able to review, identify or patch any flaws or vulnerability of a specific software since it may require other skills beyond just basic programming skills such as network or cryptographic skills. [1] Some even suggested that the large number of users contributing to the project can lead people "into a false sense of security." [2] Overall, some papers conclude that being an open source software or a proprietary software isn't an important factor for security and suggest considering other factors, such as the particular vendor/maintainer that controls the entire process. [3] After all, what if the maintainer decides to sabotage their own code? What if the project was sold to another maintainer for its own shaddy needs?

If you're referring to The Great Suspender, that extension was bought by an advertising company earlier this year. I'm using the last good version (github) though.

You might want to ask on developer of the addon: https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html

Not to be an enabler or anything, but have you tried Auto Tab Discard? Only active tabs will be loaded, so you can have thousands upon thousands of tabs without any impact on memory usage or performance.

I use Auto Tab Discard [0], which offloads tabs after a period of time. They still show as normal tabs (with a "ZZZ" icon to indicate it's been discarded), and the website reloads when I switch to them.

When I open the browser after closing it, the session is restored with all but the current tab offloaded so it opens quickly and using very little resources.

My current session has tens of tabs, only a handful of them active. It uses about .5% CPU when idle, and less than 1Gb RAM.

[0] https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html

Also https://github.com/rNeomy/auto-tab-discard, which despite the name, doesn’t close tabs, it just unloads them from memory.

I'm using Auto Tab Discard for very fine control but it is not needed most of the time. FF does this automatically now via Tab Unloading

I think there is an issue open for this in the auto tab repo. Assuming that wasn't you who opened it you can go there and give a +1 to motivate the dev.

If something like Google Chrome is using a lot of power, can I determine which sites are using the most resources in its Task Manager (Shift+Esc)? Can I use something like Auto Tab Discard to minimize resource usage in tabs I'm not using?

I think this extension does something similar: https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html