Sparky: New Official Alexa Toolbar for Firefox

The Alexa toolbar has always attracted webmasters to improve the Alexa ranking of their websites. However, the official Alexa toolbar was only available for Internet explorer users. Firefox users were using alternate extensions to increase their Alexa ranks. Now Sparky promises the official alternative for Firefox.

As Alexa celebrated the 10th anniversary of the Alexa Toolbar on July 17, they released the first FireFox compatible toolbar, called Sparky. Some cool features of the toolbar are -
* Related Links: Find sites that are similar to the one you are currently visiting.
* Traffic Trend: A sparkline showing the traffic trend from the last four months.
* Reach Meter: A neat little indicator that shows the site’s Reach.
* Traffic Rank: Shows the current site’s Alexa Traffic Rank.

When you decide to install Sparky (using Firefox), you are made to agree and accept the Alexa Privacy policy statement.

“Alexa’s toolbar service collects and stores information about the web pages you view, the data you enter in online forms and search fields, and, with versions 5.0 and higher, the products you purchase online while using the toolbar service. Although alexa does not attempt to analyze web usage data to determine the identity of any alexa user, some information collected by the toolbar service is personally identifiable. Alexa aggregates and analyzes the information it collects to improve its service and to prepare reports about aggregate web usage and shopping habits”

Alexa collects its data and determines the Alexa rank of websites depending on the usage patterns of Alexa toolbar loaded web browsers. Now with the official Firefox extension, the accuracy of data will improve as the popular Firefox user data will also be compiled.

Since the System Requirements indicate that it requires Firefox 2.0+ to work, its another reason to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox as previous 1.5 versions will not be supported soon.