Geek Technica » Google

Google Removes Ad blocking Extensions from Extension Gallery Front Page

Matt — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:33:31 +0000

Chrome Extension Gallery Main Page

One of the most interesting thing about Chrome Extension gallery, when Google unveiled it few months ago, was the fact that they were showing the most popular (read: most downloaded) extension right on the front page. This is interesting because two of the most popular all time extensions are also ad blocking extensions. Google’s main revenue source, as you might know, is online advertisements.

At the end of last year one of those Ad blocking extensions (AdThwart) became the most popular chrome extensions, so naturally it was on the top of the list on the front page. I checked back few days later to see that AdThwart magically went down from number one to number three most downloaded and all the download count was much lower than it originally showed. (Yes, I was actually interested in popular extension download count.)

I can only speculate here than Google was not comfortable with the idea of an ad blocking extension being the most popular extension, so they manually adjusted it. Even so, AdThwart was still in the top six on the front page, until yesterday. I know this because I check the gallery now and then for try out something new and I was there last night and I saw it right in the front page in the same order as they show in the Most Popular list.

Today, after reading about the official support of Greasemonkey scripts (as extensions) for Chrome I wanted to check out if they were also listing those extensions on the extension gallery. I was surprised to see that the popular list on the main page does not show the most downloaded extensions in the correct order. As a matter of fact it doesn’t represent any kind of order in terms of popularity. Every refresh (wait few minutes) shows a new list of extensions. After six tries I got six separate list of extensions and none of them were any ad blocking extensions (Your mileage may vary).

So what does it all mean? For starters, obviously someone in Google doesn’t think it is a great idea to give such easy access to ad blocking extensions right on the front page. As of this writing, the Most Popular list still shows two ad blocking extensions on the top ten list. Will it still stay the same when Chrome becomes more popular and ad blocking extension user count rolls in to millions? What’s stopping Google from blocking these extensions in the future when user base reaches a critical mass?

These are some of the tough questions Google will need to face in the future as Chrome becomes more popular.

Most Popular Extension Gallery

Is Chrome OS just another Ubuntu fork?

Matt — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:38:55 +0000

Officially Chrome OS is following the same versioning trend as Chrome browser. The tarball packed chromium source that was initially released for everyone to build Chrome OS from scratch was 0.4.22.8 and the dev channel (nightly builds) Chrome browser is 4.0.249.11 (as of this writing). But Chrome OS user-string reveals a bit more about the current OS version. I am sure you can get the same information by checking out the source but this is a less time consuming way to find out.

Chrome Browser dev channel user-agent string under Windows 7:

Operating System:    Macintosh WinNT

Browser:             Safari 1.3


                     Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 

                     (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.249.11 Safari/532.5

Chrome OS user-agent string:

Operating System:    Macintosh UNIX

Browser:             Safari 1.3


                     Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; CrOS i686 9.10.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.5 

                     (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.253.0 Safari/532.5

Even though the Chrome browser running on Chrome OS seems to be dev builds of the browser, the underlying OS identifies itself as CrOS i686 9.10.0, or more specifically version 9.10. This might have something to do with the fact that Ubuntu developers have been privately working with Google on Chrome OS way before it was officially announced in July 2009.

Taking these information into consideration I think it is safe to conclude that, under the hood, Chrome OS is nothing more than a stripped and dumbed down version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic koala with Chrome browser acting as a light-weight desktop environment (similar to XFCE or xubuntu).

First Look at Google Chrome OS

Pavs — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:06:21 +0000

Today Google officially revealed its much talked about OS to the general public. Its not an official release yet and much will be changed in terms of UI and more featured will be added as it gets an official release sometime one year for now. For the time being the project and its source has been opened up to everyone to that developers can contribute to the project. As some of you might now, Google Chrome OS relies on Linux kernel and this will without doubt give a big boost to Linux kernel and all the OS and applications that depend on it. It is fair to say that this is the single most important news for Linux. The advertising and developers muscle of Google is likely to take Chrome OS and Linux a long way forward.

Chrome OS is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian that depends on a lot of open-source software like Host AP Linux drivers, PAM, Syslinux, IBus, ConnMan, XScreenSaver.