Google Removes Ad blocking Extensions from Extension Gallery Front Page | Hacker News Reader

Google Removes Ad blocking Extensions from Extension Gallery Front Page

geektechnica.com

26 pointspavs18 comments

From what I can tell, a cron job randomizes the front-page [1] every 1 to 2 minutes (try refreshing the page a few times over the span on a couple minutes). Ad-blocking plugins appear every so often.

On the real, ranked Popular page [2] you can see that ad-block is always #1. While it is possible that Google is rotating the front page to minimize the number of downloads of ad-blockers, I think it is far more likely that they simply want to give more exposure to other popular plugins than the top X, which will likely become static.

This is a non-story.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/extensions?hl=en-US

[2] https://chrome.google.com/extensions/list/popular?hl=en-US

The front page of the Chrome extensions gallery was designed to give as many good extensions as possible some of the eyeball share from users landing on the front page. The Chrome gallery team is very interested in a healthy ecosystem, rather than promoting and re-promoting a number of older, most-popular extensions. Showing the top-N extensions all of the time is antithetical to their goals.

If you look at the Chrome front page from time-to-time, you'll see that a lot of extensions on there have only a few thousand users, but are really cool extensions. They are doing a pretty good job of surfacing less-popular or newer extensions.

Disclaimer: we are a partner extension and showed up in the gallery on the front page for a few days after the initial launch.

They just changed it from today. It wasn't always like this, so the argument that all of a sudden they are trying to promote less popular extensions, is not very reasonable. There is a "featured" section and "Today's Top Pick" section where they can promote as many extensions as they like.

I am not saying it is necessarily a bad thing, they _are_ an online ad company, it is in their best interest to make sure less people use ad blockers. But lets not justify this action under the pretense of them trying to "promote" other extensions.

Honestly, if I was in charge, I probably would have done the same.

I'm afraid you are reading too much into this. A static list of most popular extensions reinforces the popularity of those top extensions over and over. There is no grand conspiracy to kill off or discourage adblocking extensions, only to promote as much variety in the ecosystem as possible. If they wanted to kill it off, they would have just gone and removed them from the gallery and posted a TOS update as they did with YouTube downloaders:

http://blog.arpitnext.com/2009/12/google-rejected-youtube-do...

I never said they want to kill it off or implied anything like that. I stated the obvious that they are trying to make it less accessible to get ad blockers because it is in their interest.

You claim that they are trying to promote less popular extensions, which you have no way to know because they just started removing the most used popular list from the front page _today_.

Unless you work for Google, or had any conversation from anyone from Google regarding this in the last 24 hours, how can you claim such a thing?

I work for Google, on Google Chrome extensions.

The change to the gallery was actually made awhile ago, and discussed here:

http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-exten...

mmastrac is correct. We always wanted the front page to work this way, we just didn't get to it in time for ship day.

The idea is to spread the wealth a bit on the front page. Otherwise the lead the frontrunners have becomes difficult to challenge.

Thanks for clearing this up. I just noticed the change from today too.

BTW, I am a big fan of GreaseMonkey and I really appreciate your work on it and thanks for porting it to Chrome. :)

What’s stopping Google from blocking these extensions in the future when user base reaches a critical mass?

The fact that Chrome is open source, and (I assume) has the ability to install extensions from other sites should the user wish to do so. I really see this as what separates Google from Apple.

Chromium is open source, not Chrome. This may seem like semantics, but when users search the dominant search engine for "chrome web browser" they are going to get directed to Google's version of the browser. No amount of open source linkfests are going to budge that link from the top of the search results. As a consequence Chrome will always be exactly what Google wants (or allows) it to be and nothing more. If Google decides at some future point that ad blockers are eating into its bottom line then the ad blockers will disappear, end of story. I am sure it will be couched in some pseudo-technical justification (c.f. why adblock won't work on Chrome) but the end result will be the same. What separates Google from Apple is that at least the latter will have the balls to tell you to your face instead of pretending they don't know what you are talking about.

Eh? AAPL isn't telling-you-to-your-face the reasons for rejecting iPhone apps (heh, such as Google Voice). Every large company attempts to coat its shallow self-serving behavior with bullshit-flavored rainbows and unicorns.

It's interesting if it's true, but it could also be a glitch. I could see taking it off the front page, but manually changing the download count would be a bit much.

And why would you think Google wouldn't do that? Advertisement money is their lifeblood. Not that I agree with this, but it wouldn't be illegal or against their TOS to do such a thing.

No ads, no money...

no money, no power...

I would not be even slightly surprised if they went out of their way to tuck ad blocking into a little niche somewhere that requires several clicks to find - it's definitely easier to imagine than them promoting their own platform as easily ad-less when almost every dollar they make comes from ads.

It's either a glitch or they began filling the "Popular" column with random results. I reloaded the page a few times and got different results there, one included some ad blocking extension.

Screenshot: http://imgur.com/HT1R9.png

According to a comment (the comment, actually) they're just rotating the popular results some.

I'm counting down the seconds until we get a comment about how this is "evil"

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