The Marvellous Suspender: a look into the future
The time for goodbyes has come. Due to my inability to carry the project forward, and the inevitable future mandatory use of Manifest V3, The Marvellous Suspender is about to sunset.
When I decided to create the fork of the original project in 2021, cleaning up the "inconvenient" code, I published the modified extension for myself and some of my colleagues and friends who had been orphaned by The Great Suspender. I did it without any kind of pretense, I did it because I felt like it and because I already had a developer account available that allowed me to upload the extension to Google's public browser add-on gallery. I blogged about it as well because I thought it might please and be useful to some readers.
But then the unexpected happened: TMS landed on the pages of 9to5Google and from that moment "we were no longer (just) four friends at the bar".
In the meantime, a little over 3 years have passed, and the only new things that moved under the hood involved an experimental version that was not published in the Chrome Store because it might have given disruption to those who had already started using Google Chrome's native tab grouping feature. We fixed bugs, added features but - basically - in the heart of TMS still beat loudly all the code from The Great Suspender. Today TMS has more than 140,000 users worldwide, to all of them goes my biggest thanks for this time spent together.
I would have liked to have done a lot more, believe me, and if only I had had the ability I certainly would have. TMS has been a beautiful and unexpected adventure, I have come into contact with so many new people, and I will treasure what I have learned.
The GitHub repository is totally available to someone with the desire and ability to take the project forward, I will gladly transfer ownership. On the other hand, I will not do anything to damage the project, and I will continue to reject the proposals to purchase the extension that have followed numerous times over the past few years to try to grab as much user data as possible, no amount of money can keep up (although I admit that some have certainly been tempting, no need to deny it). If no one comes forward by the end of the summer, then the project will be archived and made read-only.
In the meantime, I will not remove the extension from the Google store, I will leave it available until Google itself determines that it is time to inhibit the installation of extensions that still use Manifest V2. I recommend, however, that you look for an alternative in the meantime if you want. I can certainly recommend Auto Tab Discard, which I have been using with satisfaction for years on Firefox (you can find his GitHub repository here).
Thank you from the bottom of my heart, everyone.
Ti ricordo che l'articolo originale è stato pubblicato - in italiano - sul mio blog, all'indirizzo gioxx.org/2024/06/24/the-marvellous-suspender-the-last-dance