The Great Suspender (2026): Forks, Status, Safe Alternatives

Key takeaways

• The original Great Suspender was removed from Chrome Web Store for malware in February 2021. It’s gone permanently.
• Two forks are active on CWS in June 2026: Reloaded (v2.0.0, updated May 1 2026) and Marvellous (v8.1.3, Dec 2025). Both are MV3, open-source, and volunteer-maintained.
• chrome.tabs.discard() suspends invisibly — no custom suspension page, no extra back-button history entry. (Scroll position resets on reload — a Chrome API limitation across all tab-discard tools.)

If you used The Great Suspender for years and want to know what’s still working in 2026, this page covers the current fork status, how they compare, and what SuperchargePerformance does differently.

Fork Status in June 2026

The original Great Suspender is permanently gone. Here is the verified state of every active branch as of June 2026:

Sources: chrome-stats.com, extpose.com, GitHub commit logs (verified June 2026).

What Happened to The Great Suspender

The original Great Suspender had over 2 million Chrome users. In late 2020, the original developer sold it to an unknown buyer. The new owner injected malware — silently collecting user data and loading remote code. Google removed it from Chrome Web Store in February 2021.

Community forks emerged immediately. The most maintained today are Great Suspender Reloaded and The Marvellous Suspender. Both stripped the malicious code and migrated to MV3 before Chrome started disabling MV2 for standard users from Chrome 139 in mid-2025.

The original GitHub repo (greatsuspender/thegreatsuspender) hasn’t had a commit since October 2020. The thegreatsuspender-notrack fork by aciidic stalled in April 2021 and isn’t on the Chrome Web Store. Those are dead ends.

Great Suspender Reloaded in 2026

Great Suspender Reloaded (CWS ID: hlofigcdgjlnalbkeeinfcjceabpamci) shipped v2.0.0 on May 1, 2026. The GitHub repo (tim-dim-ext/The-Great-Suspender-Reloaded) had commits through April 30, 2026 — so this is an actively maintained fork as of this writing.

It is open-source GPL 2.0, runs entirely locally, no analytics or telemetry, and uses a custom suspension page rather than Chrome’s native discard API. The volunteer maintainer is reachable on GitHub. The CWS title currently reads “Tab Suspender | The Great Suspender 2026”, which explains why it ranks for the status query.

40K users. 4.08-star rating on 53 votes. Small community, active code.

The Marvellous Suspender in 2026

The Marvellous Suspender (CWS ID: noogafoofpebimajpfpamcfhoaifemoa) is the larger fork with ~90K users. Maintained by gioxx, stable release v8.1.3 dated December 22, 2025. It is also open-source, MV3, and no tracking. See the full Marvellous Suspender status page for a deep dive on this fork.

The roughly six-month gap since its last update is the main concern. Chrome ships every four weeks. A fork unupdated for six-plus months accumulates silent failures — manifest permission drift, API deprecations — that you often won’t notice until something stops working.

How MV3 Tab Suspension Works

SuperchargePerformance uses chrome.tabs.discard(), Chrome’s native tab lifecycle API. This differs from both forks in one important way: suspension is invisible.

The Great Suspender forks replace the tab’s content with a custom suspension page. Pressing back after a tab wakes up navigates to that suspension page — it’s a history entry. Scroll position resets to top. There’s a brief flash of the suspension screen before content loads.

Chrome’s discard API skips the suspension-page UX entirely. The tab stays in the tab bar with its favicon and title. Memory drops to near zero. Clicking it triggers a normal reload — no custom screen, no extra history entry. (Scroll position resets on reload, the same as any page reload after a long idle; this is a Chrome API limitation that applies to all tab-discard tools.)

Feature Comparison

Two Reasons to Switch from a Fork

1. Maintenance trajectory. Chrome 149 is current. Great Suspender Reloaded updated to v2.0.0 in May 2026 — good cadence. The Marvellous Suspender’s last update was December 2025 — roughly six months of Chrome releases without a patch. Volunteer projects update when maintainers have time. SuperchargePerformance ships on a consistent schedule tied to Chrome releases.

2. The ownership history. The 2020 compromise involved 2 million users who had no idea their extension had been sold and weaponized. Both forks cleaned the code, but the original extension was monetized through user data after a quiet ownership transfer. That risk profile is worth factoring in when choosing what runs persistently in your browser.

What Stays the Same

The core tab suspension behavior from The Great Suspender works identically in SuperchargePerformance:

• Inactive tabs have their memory freed
• Tabs playing audio are never suspended (checks tab.audible)
• Pinned tabs are protected
• Tabs with unsaved form inputs are protected
• Per-site whitelist to exclude domains from suspension
• Configurable inactivity timers (15 min free, 5 min medium, custom timer on PRO)

Everything familiar is present, plus ad blocking with 186K+ rules, a RAM savings dashboard, and a popup showing total memory freed.

Trust and Security

The Great Suspender’s 2020 compromise is an object lesson in extension ownership risk. Popular free extensions with no business model can be sold to unknown buyers who monetize the user base through silent data collection or remote code execution.

SuperchargePerformance has a clear business model: an optional PRO tier. That removes the incentive to monetize through user data. All code runs locally. Zero outbound network requests, verified from the codebase. No remote code loading, no analytics, no data transmission to any server.

Both active forks are open-source and the malicious code was removed. Open-source is meaningful protection — auditing commit history is tractable. The Reloaded fork’s GitHub is actively watched.

Bottom Line

The Great Suspender is gone. Its two live MV3 forks — Great Suspender Reloaded (v2.0.0, May 2026) and The Marvellous Suspender (v8.1.3, Dec 2025) — both work on current Chrome. If you want a fork that matches the original’s behavior exactly, Reloaded is more recently updated. If you want a larger community, Marvellous has 90K users.

SuperchargePerformance offers the same tab suspension behavior on a stable MV3 architecture with active maintenance, ad blocking that saves 300–700ms per page load, and a dashboard showing RAM freed across all tabs. The original Great Suspender never had any of that.

For how SuperchargePerformance compares to other tab management options, see SuperchargePerformance vs Auto Tab Discard.