Recently I've updated the Alexa Sparky add-on for FireFox 3.0, which displays website traffic rankings on the status bar. It's a nice little plugin that not only lets you see how large other sites are, but it also helps improve your rankings a little bit. After updating the add-on, I started noticing some strange behavior while browsing the web. Whenever a page is unreachable, it defaults to Alexa's search results page. Strange, that has never happened to me before. For a minute, I thought I was hit with another Spyware. I also noticed that the Awesome Bar on FireFox doesn't work anymore. If I wanted to search for a movie on Rotten Tomatoes, for instance, typing in "rotten tomatoes ninja assassin" takes me to the dreaded Alexa page instead of Rotten Tomatoes. It essentially rendered the Awesome Bar useless. I checked out the options on the add-on and found these two options were enabled:
- enable error handling
- enable custom address bar search
I disabled those two options and all was fine again. Those sneaky bastards. Those options shouldn't be enabled by default. All I wanted with the Alexa Sparky Add-on is to monitor web traffic on my site and others; I don't want their crappy "error handling" or "custom address bar search," both of which are just a sneaky way to redirect traffic to their useless search engine. Bad Alexa. I still like your add-on, but anymore stunts like this, and I'll just drop you guys and use your rival compete.com instead.
