Is Marvellous Suspender Safe in 2026? What You Need

Key takeaways

• Marvellous Suspender v8.1.3 is live on the Chrome Web Store, last updated December 22, 2025 (~90,000 users, rated 4.3). It is MV3-compatible and safe — the malicious Great Suspender code was removed.
• It is volunteer-maintained by one developer (gioxx) with no guaranteed update schedule. Chrome ships every 4 weeks.
• SuperchargePerformance is an actively maintained MV3 alternative with invisible suspension (chrome.tabs.discard()), ad blocking, and a RAM dashboard — features Marvellous Suspender never offered.

The Marvellous Suspender is safe in 2026. Version 8.1.3 is on the Chrome Web Store, MV3-compatible, and the malicious code injected by the original Great Suspender’s new owner in 2020 is not present in this fork. With ~90,000 users and a 4.3-star rating as of June 2026, it’s the most-used Great Suspender fork still operating. The real question isn’t whether it’s safe — it’s whether volunteer-maintained software with a six-month update gap suits your reliability expectations.

What Marvellous Suspender Is (and How It Got Here)

The original Great Suspender was pulled from Chrome Web Store in February 2021. Google removed it after discovering the then-new owner had injected malware — silently harvesting browsing data and executing remote scripts on millions of users who had no idea ownership had changed. The extension is permanently gone from CWS.

Marvellous Suspender forked from the pre-malware codebase. The maintainer, gioxx, stripped the malicious code, continued development, and eventually migrated to MV3 before Chrome 138 disabled MV2 for standard users (mid-2025). As of June 2026, the extension is at v8.1.3 (released December 22, 2025 — about six months earlier). It sits in the “Workflow & Planning” category on CWS with approximately 90,000 users.

That December 2025 update is the most recent version on record. Whether anything has shipped between then and now is not visible from the CWS listing. Check the GitHub repository for the current commit history.

Current CWS Status (June 2026)

The extension is not dead, not abandoned (a six-month gap between updates is normal for volunteer software), and not flagged by Google. If you have it installed and it’s working, there is no urgent reason to switch.

How Marvellous Suspender Suspends Tabs

Marvellous Suspender replaces an inactive tab’s content with a custom suspension page. When you click a suspended tab, you see the suspension screen briefly before the original page reloads. This is the same approach the original Great Suspender used.

There’s one practical downside to this method: the suspension page can insert itself into browser history. In some configurations, pressing the Back button after reloading a suspended tab navigates to another suspension screen rather than the previous site. Scroll position resets on reload, and there’s a visible intermediate screen before the content comes back.

Chrome’s chrome.tabs.discard() API works differently. The tab’s renderer process is unloaded completely, but the tab stays in the tab bar showing its original title and favicon — no suspension screen. Clicking it reloads normally with no visible interruption and no history entry from the suspension itself. SuperchargePerformance uses this method.

Side-by-Side Comparison

The Volunteer Maintenance Question

Marvellous Suspender’s update cadence is worth knowing. The version history on CWS shows several updates in 2024-2025, and the most recent (December 22, 2025) is now roughly six months old as of June 2026. That gap is not alarming for an active volunteer project — it is normal.

What it does mean: Chrome’s 4-week release cycle can introduce silent regressions between updates. The MV3 APIs Marvellous Suspender depends on are stable, so most Chrome updates won’t break it. But if Google changes tab lifecycle behavior or adds new API restrictions, volunteer-maintained forks respond on a best-effort schedule. There’s no commercial stake, no support SLA, no engineering team monitoring Chrome canary for breaking changes.

This is not a criticism of gioxx’s work. The extension has 90,000 users because it has worked reliably. It’s a fact about the structural difference between volunteer and commercial maintenance.

The Security Track Record Question

The Great Suspender compromise is worth keeping in mind. Not because Marvellous Suspender is unsafe (the fork is clean), but because the original incident showed how extension ownership changes can weaponize a trusted user base without any visible signal. Two million users had no idea until Google acted.

Marvellous Suspender is open source. The repository is publicly auditable. The code is not obfuscated. That is materially different from the closed-source Great Suspender that got sold to an unknown buyer.

SuperchargePerformance’s security posture is verifiable differently: zero outbound network requests, confirmed from the source code, with a commercial model that removes the incentive to monetize through data. No account is required; all processing runs locally.

When to Keep Marvellous Suspender

Staying with Marvellous Suspender makes sense if:

• It’s working and the December 2025 update is recent enough for your standards
• You only need basic tab suspension — nothing more
• You’ve already configured a whitelist that you don’t want to rebuild
• You want a single-purpose tool with no additional features

When SuperchargePerformance Makes More Sense

Switch if:

• The suspension screen interruption bothers you — invisible discard removes it entirely
• You want ad blocking alongside suspension (two fewer extensions to manage)
• You want a RAM dashboard showing exactly how much is being freed per tab
• You care that your tab suspender has active commercial maintenance and a public bug tracker
• You have web apps like Figma, Notion, Slack, or Gmail that you want auto-protected without manual whitelist configuration (SuperchargePerformance auto-protects 25+)

Both extensions free the same ~90-95% of each suspended tab’s RAM; that part is equivalent. The gap is in everything around suspension: protection logic, reliability signals, and whether you want blocking and metrics in the same install.

For how the tab suspension mechanism compares to Chrome’s built-in option, see Tab Suspender vs Chrome Memory Saver. For the full story on Great Suspender forks, see Best Great Suspender Alternative.