Co-founder of Marvellous Codeworks. Rescued The Great Discarder, built The Great-er Tab Discarder
A targeted fix release addressing the tab group restore regression introduced by Chrome 149, where suspended tabs inside tab groups were silently discarded after a browser restart.
Suspended tabs inside tab groups restored correctly after restart
Starting with Chrome 149, a change in the browser's session restore engine caused tabs with non-https:// URLs — including TMS suspended tabs — to be skipped when restoring tab groups. This resulted in blank New Tab pages appearing in place of your suspended tabs after every restart.
TMS 8.1.4 works around the Chrome-side behavior and restores suspended tabs inside tab groups correctly again. Tabs outside tab groups were not affected and continue to work as before.
note
If you used the back-grouped-tabs companion extension as a temporary workaround, you can safely remove it now that TMS includes a built-in fix.
Vivaldi implements a non-standard version of the chrome.runtime.getContexts API that was causing TMS to throw an unhandled error. This release adds a workaround that detects and handles the inconsistency, restoring normal operation for Vivaldi users.
note
This is the current stable release available on the Chrome Web Store. If you are on Vivaldi and experienced unexpected behavior after the 8.1.2 update, updating to 8.1.3 should resolve it.
Special thanks to @wobondar for supporting the project! ❤️
Co-founder of Marvellous Codeworks. Rescued The Great Discarder, built The Great-er Tab Discarder
A maintenance release with a handful of quality-of-life improvements to the session management page, the suspended tab watermark, and the update banner.
When you export your session from the Session Management page, the downloaded file now includes the current date in its name. This makes it much easier to keep track of multiple backups without manually renaming files.
The suspended tab page now displays the TMS version number as a subtle watermark. This small addition makes it easier to identify which version was running when users share screenshots in bug reports.
The "a new version is available" notification banner is now interactive — clicking it takes you directly to the release page instead of requiring you to navigate there manually.
An issue introduced in 8.1.0 caused TMS to show the "a newer version is available" notification even when the extension had already been updated to the latest version. This has been resolved: the banner now correctly compares the installed version against the latest release and only appears when an actual update is available.
Co-founder of Marvellous Codeworks. Rescued The Great Discarder, built The Great-er Tab Discarder
TMS 8.1.0 is a significant feature release. Tab Groups are now a first-class citizen, favicons are more reliable, and the suspended tab page can now follow your OS theme automatically.
TMS will now save and restore your Tab Groups across version upgrades and session save/restore operations. Groups are preserved with their names and colors. This was the most requested feature since the MV3 rewrite.
A new System option has been added to the theme selector in Settings → General. When selected, the suspended tab page follows your operating system's light/dark preference automatically. The existing Light and Dark options remain.
The "Suspend automatically after" dropdown now includes additional minute-level options, giving more fine-grained control over how quickly inactive tabs are suspended.
Several improvements to favicon fetching and caching make the icon shown on suspended tab pages more consistent, especially in Chromium-based browsers like Vivaldi.
A dedicated quick-access button to the Session Management page has been added to the extension popup, so you can reach your saved sessions without opening the full settings.
Co-founder of Marvellous Codeworks. Rescued The Great Discarder, built The Great-er Tab Discarder
info
The post has been updated! (2025-07-05)
I have included a note unambiguously stating that you will need to use only the 'src' folder to load the unpackaged extension into Chrome.
I have changed the links to the repository and the ZIP file to download. The PR has now been merged with the original repository!
Had I lost hope? I'll admit it — yeah, pretty much completely.
So you can imagine how thrilled I was when I finally saw a light at the end of that tunnel.
Rob is the guy behind The Great-er Tab Discarder, itself a fork of an older, seemingly abandoned project — another extension born out of the need to fix a gap that often makes Chrome unusable in the long run (especially when you're juggling hundreds of open tabs).
When Rob took an interest in TMS and decided to take on the challenge of making it compatible with the more limited Manifest V3, I saw an opportunity. I reached out to him, and together with a third person from Google, we kicked off a group chat to start connecting the dots and try to make the leap.
The result? It's publicly available here: github.com/gioxx/MarvellousSuspender/pull/253 (now merged with the original repository) — a pull request that includes a pretty much rewritten version of TMS for Manifest V3. A 1:1 migration of what's under the hood in the current TMS just isn't possible.
What we need now is a pool of users willing to test this new version of TMS — help us figure out what's still missing, what kinds of issues might come up across different environments, systems, and setups, and what needs to be fixed right away before we publish it on the Chrome Web Store.
Only then can we reach all users again and start the (long) journey toward improvements and new features, aiming to finally hit full feature parity — something we're still missing today.
A few quick but essential tips before taking the leap.
If you're thinking of joining the testing community for the new version of TMS, I strongly recommend you:
Save the current state of your open tabs in Chrome.
TMS (the version currently available) lets you create a full backup, which you can export and keep safe.
Wake up all your tabs (or pick and choose which ones you want to keep active in the browser — you can always reopen the others later). Try to streamline things as much as you can, so the transition to the new version of TMS is smoother.
Install the new version of TMS.
Clone the repo to your PC (or download the full ZIP and extract it), enable Developer Mode in Chrome (chrome://extensions/), then hit the Load unpacked button and select the folder where you saved the files from the repo. You have to load only the src subfolder. At that point, you'll be running the new version of TMS — compatible with Google's Manifest V3 — and it'll be back to managing your tabs like before.
What you'll see looks familiar — same interface you're used to, nothing seems to have changed. But under the hood, it's a whole different engine.
Just a quick reminder: using the Load unpacked option won't overwrite your current TMS installation.
Chrome treats the new Manifest V3-compatible version as a completely separate extension, so there's no need to uninstall your current TMS — both versions can run side by side.
That's why we suggest:
Keep your current TMS installed, but set the automatic suspension to Never.
Set up the new version to handle tab suspension.
This way, you'll be able — if you want — to wake up your older tabs and suspend them again using the new version.
warning
The current limit for how many tabs the new version of TMS can actively manage at once is 500 (Work around Chrome's limit of 500 Alarms). This shouldn't affect how the extension works — it just means that if you have more than 500 active, unsuspended tabs open in your current session, it might take a bit longer for all of them to be processed and suspended properly.
Thanks a ton to everyone willing to test, break things, and share thoughts — this kind of support is what keeps open source alive and kicking.
Co-founder of Marvellous Codeworks. Rescued The Great Discarder, built The Great-er Tab Discarder
A polished release focused on the suspended-tab experience: favicon dimming, flexible restore options, popup improvements, and automatic options saving — plus a fix for suspended tabs that Chrome was blocking on direct load.
Fixed: Suspended tabs being blocked by Chrome when opened directly — for example, by a session restore tool
Fixed: Suspended tab favicons not loading on initial browser launch. Note: favicons must be in the browser cache to display correctly until a local favicon cache is implemented in a future release.
Co-founder of Marvellous Codeworks. Rescued The Great Discarder, built The Great-er Tab Discarder
The biggest feature addition in TGD's history: Suspending tabs is now a first-class option alongside Discarding. If you've been using TMS alongside TGD, you may find you no longer need both.
TGD can now Suspend tabs in addition to Discarding them. Suspending keeps the tab visible with its title and favicon while freeing memory — the difference from Discarding is that the tab shows a dedicated suspended page rather than being silently unloaded by the browser.
Suspend individual tabs from the extension popup or via keyboard shortcuts
Switch between automatic Suspending and Discarding in Settings — you choose which behaviour applies to idle tabs
Suspended tabs can now display a custom title prefix to distinguish them visually at a glance. Example prefixes: 💤🔴🟡 — plus a full range of color options.
The migration UI has been upgraded: you can now view and individually select which eligible tabs to Migrate or Convert, rather than migrating everything at once.
Co-founder of Marvellous Codeworks. Rescued The Great Discarder, built The Great-er Tab Discarder
A targeted fix for a regression in "Discard at startup" that caused tabs to be discarded during browser idle worker restarts — not just on actual browser startup.
Fixed: "Discard at startup" (again) — the previous fix in 1.2.1 did not cover the case where Chrome restarts idle service workers in the background. Tabs were being discarded unexpectedly as a result.
