[notatoad]

And Google is probably right - for most people, if all of a sudden their new tab page was just a blank screen they'd assume something was broken. It was pretty easy to change that setting without knowing what it meant.

Installing an extension is a much more obvious process - it has a description and screenshots showing exactly what it does, so nobody should be surprised.

Both chrome and Firefox have been shifting to moving any behaviour that could appear as "broken" out of their settings and into extensions. I wouldn't assume tension in the team because a chrome Dev built the extension, more likely just normal process.

[ksynwa]

It's not "all of a sudden" though, is it? You would have to explicitly set new tabs to show about:blank for that to happen.