Just Say No To The Alexa Toolbar

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Thinking About Using The Alexa Toolbar?

If you are a power user, just say no

One user found that Alexa cut the number of browser windows that could be opened by 50%

And it somehow messes up the popup blockers in other browser toolbars

April 2004: Editor's note: It's possible that a later version of the Alexa toolbar might fix the problems outlined here. Then again, the following story is still timeless for it's insight into the problems that poorly tested or poorly designed "harmless" addons can cause.

I got rid of my copy of the tomagochi for webmasters, called "Alexa", today...

I've noticed that recently I'm unable to open more than about 15 web browser windows. (I always like to open a new window on every google result I look at, and often regular pages too. All depends on whether or not I'm finished looking at the current pages.)

Unfortunately, with a couple of messenger windows, outlook, a couple of dos prompts, and an email program, and sometimes a copy of Excel, (my standard set of stuff I'm constantly using), recently after about 12-15 browser windows are open, I start having missing menus, missing toolbars, right clicks that don't work, and other anomolies.

I also noticed that eventhough I have Alexa's popup blocking turned off, (I would rather use the [Google Toolbar]?Create popup blocking), sometimes Alexa seems to be confusing Google and causing Google to deny popups, even from their own search pages for things like launching search results in a new window. This is not consistent, sometimes it works. It might just be a problem with low memory or some other resource exhaustion.

Yesterday I uninstalled Alexa. I am now happily sitting here with my usual mix of stuff, plus 24 browser windows. Nothing strange is happening...

Unfortunately Alexa didn't uninstall properly, now I'm getting some kind of error dialog after every reboot about some missing component, no title bar on the dialog to figure out which app is complaining. But that's a small price to pay to at least be back to normal performance.

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