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The Marvellous Suspender 9.1.0 is live - tab groups, real screenshots and a calmer startup

· 5 min read
Giovanni Solone
Giovanni Solone
Co-founder of Marvellous Codeworks
Andrea Margiovanni
Andrea Margiovanni
Maintainer of The Marvellous Suspender

TMS 9.1.0 is live on the Chrome Web Store as of today. If you installed TMS from the Store, there's nothing to do: Chrome updates it by itself. To check, open chrome://extensions and look at The Marvellous Suspender's version.

TL;DR
  • 9.1.0 is out, on the Chrome Web Store and on GitHub.
  • New: tab group protections, native screenshots for previews, a setting for startup checks, Ukrainian.
  • Fixed: browser freezes after a restart with lots of suspended tabs, and a long list of smaller bugs.
  • Security: three advisories closed, explained here. 9.0.3 and earlier are affected, so make sure you're updated.
  • On a test build? Please switch back to the Store version.

What's new​

The preview post goes through all of this in detail, and the numbers post shows how much work went into it. In short:

  • Tab groups: never suspend a named group, never suspend any tab in a group, and suspend or unsuspend all the tabs not in a group, from the context menus or two bindable keyboard shortcuts.
  • Tab previews: the tab you're looking at is captured with a real browser screenshot, so YouTube, GitHub and other pages that came out blank now get a proper preview. Choose how with Capture method. SnapDOM replaces html2canvas as the page renderer.
  • Keep a recent screenshot of tabs as I use them: opt-in and off by default. It gives real previews to tabs suspended later in the background.
  • Startup: restored suspended tabs are checked a few at a time, and how many is now a setting, from 1 to 8, default 3.
  • Ukrainian joins the supported languages, and Ukrainian and Sinhala now actually load when the language follows the browser. The help tooltips are easier to translate and can be reached from the keyboard.

What's fixed​

The biggest fix is for browsers freezing, or TMS crashing, after a restart with lots of suspended tabs (#523). Also fixed: file:// pages that couldn't be suspended from the popup, a context menu that could disappear, Drive auto-backups that didn't retry after a temporary failure, Tab Health false positives on grouped tabs, and a paused toolbar icon that was hard to tell from the active one. Discarded tabs are also no longer reloaded just to take a screenshot.

Security​

9.1.0 closes three security advisories, all reported privately and now public:

The dedicated post explains what they were, who found them, and what you should do.

Permissions​

The update adds no new install warning. activeTab is used for the native screenshot of the tab being suspended, and access to all sites is requested only if you turn on "Keep a recent screenshot of tabs as I use them". The Permissions page has the details.

If you're on a test build​

If you installed v9.1.0-test.523 or v9.1.0-test.551, it won't update by itself. Thank you for testing, and please go back to the Store version.

The documentation is now stable​

As announced, what was the Next documentation is now the stable TMS documentation, and it describes 9.1.0. Next stays online for what comes after this release.

What's next​

The 9.1.1 milestone collects the follow-up fixes and the Edge Add-ons Store publication, while Group Policy support moved to 9.2.0.

Thanks​

This release belongs to the people who built it: @jadshaker, @ctsstc, @amargiovanni and @hospotho, @squeeze440 for a very good security report, the Crowdin translators, and everyone who opened an issue, tested a pre-release build or sent a debug report. Thank you.

I wish you all the best on your journey.

Giovanni

GitHub release, with the package and its checksum: v9.1.0. Full changelog: CHANGELOG.md