"HairAndBeardGuy's 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. For other enquiries you can email me at [email protected].

If you have lost tabs from your browser: I have written a guide for how to recover your lost tabs here.

Currently unavailable

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 unarchived folder and confirm.

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

Be sure to unsuspend all suspended tabs before removing any other version of the extension or they will disappear forever!

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.

This extension has a small external api to allow other extensions to request the suspension of a tab. See this issue for more information. And please let me know about it so that I can try it out!

It is possible to force settings by defining group policies on Microsoft Windows.

The whitelist is stored internally as a string, with one URL per line.

The following settings can be defined:

• SCREEN_CAPTURE (string, default: '0')
• SCREEN_CAPTURE_FORCE (boolean, default: false)
• SUSPEND_IN_PLACE_OF_DISCARD (boolean, default: false)
• DISCARD_IN_PLACE_OF_SUSPEND (boolean, default: false)
• USE_ALT_SCREEN_CAPTURE_LIB (boolean, default: false)
• DISCARD_AFTER_SUSPEND (boolean, default: false)
• IGNORE_WHEN_OFFLINE (boolean, default: false)
• IGNORE_WHEN_CHARGING (boolean, default: false)
• UNSUSPEND_ON_FOCUS (boolean, default: false)
• IGNORE_PINNED (boolean, default: true)
• IGNORE_FORMS (boolean, default: true)
• IGNORE_AUDIO (boolean, default: true)
• IGNORE_ACTIVE_TABS (boolean, default: true)
• IGNORE_CACHE (boolean, default: false)
• ADD_CONTEXT (boolean, default: true)
• SYNC_SETTINGS (boolean, default: true)
• SUSPEND_TIME (string (minutes), default: '60')
• NO_NAG (boolean, default: false)
• WHITELIST (string (one URL per line), default: '')
• THEME (string, default: 'light')

Contributions are very welcome. Feel free to submit pull requests for new features and bug fixes. For new features, ideally you would raise an issue for the proposed change first so that we can discuss ideas. This will go a long way to ensuring your pull request is accepted.

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

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.