In Allowing Ad Blockers, a Test for Google

In a manifesto-like e-mail message sent last month to all Google employees, Jonathan Rosenberg, a senior vice president for product management, told them to commit to greater transparency and open industry standards. Rather than hoard knowledge to exploit it, he wrote in "The Meaning of Open," share it and watch Google and the entire Internet prosper. With the Chrome browser, however, Google's inclusive principles are being put to the test: a new version of the browser allows, one might even say encourages, users to stop Google ads from appearing.

How Google got to such a position speaks to the inherent dynamism (or is that chaos?) of business on the Internet. Google announced on Dec. 8 that the test, or beta, version of Chrome would accept extensions — little programs that improve or customize the browser's performance — as a way of harnessing the creativity of an outside community of programmers who would work free and agree to share what they make with others. The standard version should do likewise in a matter of months, Google said. Google's extensions mimic the "add-on" system that has flourished on the open-source Firefox browser.

As it happens, two 28-year-olds, Michael Gundlach, an independent programmer from outside Athens, Ga., and Tom Joseph, an M.D.-Ph.D. student at Mount Sinai Medical School, separately went through the exact same experience. In telephone interviews, each told of excitedly looking to see if he could install a Chrome extension of his favorite Firefox add-on, Adblock Plus, which prevents ads from appearing on Web sites, whether bright flashing animation or the text ads that Google serves up after a search. They did not find one. So, naturally, each spent a day or so creating a rough version of such an extension, with much more work to come. AdThwart from Mr. Joseph is now No. 2 in popularity among the more than 1,200 Chrome extensions; AdBlock from Mr. Gundlach is No. 8. Together, they already have more than 120,000 users.