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rnturn 06-06-2017 05:56 PM

Chrome abruptly closing tabs...
 
I just encountered a weird Chrome behavior that I've never seen before. I had several Chrome windows open, each with tabs opened for specific topics: programming-related stuff in one window, news in another, etc. A little while ago, I found that most of the tabs I had open in each window had been closed. In most cases it looked like Chrome chose to execute the "Close tabs to the right" function in each and every browser windows. Whatever happened didn't distinguish between pinned tabs or garden-variety tabs. Chrome itself did not crash or shutdown.

This happened in Chrome 58.0.3029.110. It's a 64-bit version running on OpenSUSE 13.2. No recent patches have been applied. (And, "yes", I know that 13.2 is not current.)

One thing I've noticed that, after the Great Tab Purge, the Great Suspender extension has been disabled and marked with a message about a security issue. It's possible that the tabs I lost were all "suspended" but I have no way to know for sure. (I'll have to think long and hard about giving up that extension. Without it Chrome takes over the whole system and everything crawls to the points of the whole system becoming unusable.)

So now the questions:

Has anyone else seen this happen?

Is there some way to prevent this from happening? Short of bookmarking all tabs every hour that is. (And in every window... ugh.)

Is there a way to disable some of the more, IMHO, dangerous tab functions? I suspect that "Close other tabs" and "Close all to the right" are only useful to a small minority of Chrome users.

Any theories, tips, war stories are welcomed.

[Update] Found a reference that mentioned that Google decided they should clobber this extension on everyone's browsers without notice. I'm attempting to use the session management 'reload' feature to restore the closed/suspended tabs. No luck yet.

--
Rick

hydrurga 06-06-2017 06:11 PM

Relevant: https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegreatsuspender

rnturn 06-06-2017 06:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hydrurga (Post 5719854)

Heh heh. In the time it took for you to post that link and me seeing your reply, github has gone down for maintenance.

I was able to recover the lost tabs by re-enabling the Great suspender and using the session management function. Going to save the tabs using the bookmark all tabs function as a backstop in case Google goes and disables that extension again.

If Google has the ability to go out and disable end-users' browser extensions, you'd think that a more user friendly way of dealing with the potential security problem would be for them to implement a pop-up window function that lets them open a window explaining that the extension's users could be at risk and letting them deal with it. The way Google chose to handle it, IMHO, is about like deciding to reboot a critical server at 2PM without sending out a notice to "save your work... reboot in five minutes". Not a good way to stay on good terms with your user community.

hydrurga 06-07-2017 04:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rnturn (Post 5719866)
Heh heh. In the time it took for you to post that link and me seeing your reply, github has gone down for maintenance.

I was able to recover the lost tabs by re-enabling the Great suspender and using the session management function. Going to save the tabs using the bookmark all tabs function as a backstop in case Google goes and disables that extension again.

If Google has the ability to go out and disable end-users' browser extensions, you'd think that a more user friendly way of dealing with the potential security problem would be for them to implement a pop-up window function that lets them open a window explaining that the extension's users could be at risk and letting them deal with it. The way Google chose to handle it, IMHO, is about like deciding to reboot a critical server at 2PM without sending out a notice to "save your work... reboot in five minutes". Not a good way to stay on good terms with your user community.

Glad you sorted it out. :)

For posterity, and in the knowledge that the github page will change over time anyway, here's the text on that page that was relevant:

Quote:

Webstore is live again with an official release!!! Please read if you have lost tabs

The webstore version of this extension was compromised yesterday. It has since been returned to my ownership and I have published a new version of the extension. This is version 6.30 and it is an official update including some more recent gitHub contributions and bug fixes. This version was built from the develop branch. I will tag and push to master soon.

While the extension was out of my control, an update was forced upon all users. I have inspected the source code of this unsolicited update, and it was not modified in any way except for a change in version number (it has a version 6.22 but in all other respects it is the same as v6.21).

Unfortunately, due to the way the extension works, when it is disabled, all suspended tabs are removed from the chrome browser. The only way to recover these tabs is to re-enable the extension. This is safe to do.

If you were asked recently to accept new permissions, this is purely because you were upgrading from an older version of the extension to a newer one (v6.22). The extension has required these permissions to operate for quite some time now and is not related at all to the extension being compromised.

For more information on the compromise, please refer to this gitHub issue: (https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegre...der/issues/512)

For more information on the permissions required for the extension, please refer to this gitHub issue: (https://github.com/deanoemcke/thegre...der/issues/213)

rnturn 06-07-2017 10:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hydrurga (Post 5720006)
... here's the text on that page that was relevant:

Yep.

I tried the link a little bit after I posted above and found the discussion where the developer assured users that 6.22 could be re-enabled. I'd actually run across the same discussion via a search engine and had begun the recovery process. Late last night I noticed that several systems' Chrome/Chromium browsers had new tabs announcing the update to 6.30.

I'll mark this one as "solved".


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