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.<p>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.<p>This is a non-story.<p>[1] <a href="https://chrome.google.com/extensions?hl=en-US" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/extensions?hl=en-US</a><p>[2] <a href="https://chrome.google.com/extensions/list/popular?hl=en-US" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/extensions/list/popular?hl=en-US</a>