About every four or five months it seems that I’m faced with a Mozilla Firefox update that, inevitably, renders one of my favorite plugins, Adsense Notifier, completely useless. It’s a clever and wonderful little plug-in that simply checks your Adsense earnings every 20 minutes or so and displays the results in the status bar of your Firefox browser. It’s a heck of a lot easier than logging into your Adsense account every hour to see how you’re doing for the day, week or even month. I’m kind of surprised Google hasn’t released some of their own Adsense applications, widgets and apps for various smartphones. Logging into a website to check data seems so… old-fashioned 
You can still visit the Adsense Notifier plugin home page for information and updates, but it would seem that the developer has found other things to do with his time. This plugin is really only useful if you have a blog that has Adsense advertisements and you want to know your revenue, click through rate, and traffic of your site at every moment of the day. So, in the grand scheme of things, its audience is fairly small.
Anyway, whenever Firefox updates the Adsense Notifier plugin stops working, claiming that it can’t be used with the current version of Firefox (3.5.2 as of writing this). The truth is: the Adsense Notifier plugin will work just fine with the latest version of Firefix, but some manual editing is required. You don’t need to know any programming or have much more than basic PC knowledge. I have found a couple different tutorials on how you fix the Adsense Notifier plugin to get it working again, but they were either designed for the Mac or missed some critical steps. I decided I’d put all the info together into one quick tutorial on how to get your Adsense Notifier working again.
1. Disable and Uninstall Adsense Notifier: I don’t even know if this is entirely necessary, but before I re-install a plugin I always disable it and completely remove it from my Firefox. I just don’t want to chance different file versions floating around. Don’t be afraid… you have nothing to lose, right? Adsense Notifier isn’t working for you, so just get rid of it. You can disable and uninstall it by going to the Tools menu of Firefox and choosing Add-ons. Find Adsense Notifier and uninstall it. Restart Firefox.
2. Download Adsense Notifier again: Now you need to download the latest version of it. Note that I said “download” not install. You can visit the developer’s site at http://code.mincus.com/ and find the link that reads “Adsense Notifier 0.9.8″. Right-click on the link and choose to save the file to your PC. It will save a file called adsense.xpi.
3. Rename Adsense.xpi: Here’s a little secret – .xpi files are really just .zip files with a few special components. Rename adsense.xpi to adsense.zip. If you can’t see your file extensions then you’ll have to go poke around in your folder options to turn them on. The steps are slightly different depending upon which version of Windows you’re using.
4. Open Adsense.zip: Now that you have a .zip file instead of an .xpi file you can just double-click on it and it should open like a regular folder, or at least into your default .zip application.
5. Edit Install.rdf: Inside this adsense.zip file are some folders and files. One of the files you’ll see is called install.rdf. You’ll want to open it with a text editor and take a quick look around. If you can’t open it from your zip program, try dragging the file out of you zip file and dumping it on your Windows desktop. Now you should more easily be able to edit it with a text editor.
That’s the file that gives Firefox some of the plugin install info and, for some reason, the “max” version of Firefox was set to 3.0b5 down at line 33 of the file. There’s probably a very good reason for that, but I’m not a plugin developer so I don’t care. Change it to 3.99 or 4 or even 8. Just make sure the number you change it to his higher than the version of Firefox you have. I set mine to 4. Save and close the file with your text editor. If you were working on the file on your desktop you’ll want to drag this new version back into the zip file, replacing the old version.
6. Edit nsAdsensenotifier.js: Just editing the install.rdf file will allow you to install Adsense notifier, but it has an annoying bug where it doesn’t seem to want to save the password all the time. Here’s how you get around that bug. While you’re still in the adsense.zip file, go into the components folder. See that file called nsAdsensenotifier.js? That’s the next file we’re going to edit with our text editor. Same deal goes here: if you can’t edit within your zip program, just yank it to the desktop and open it with a text file editor.
Now we’re going to make two quick edits on separate lines. At lines 103 and 109 you’ll see something like passwd = “” on both lines (yes, the variables and syntax are slightly different). Just type in your adsense password there. In the image I put in the term mypassword instead of my real password (duh). Yes, you’re basically hardcoding your password into the plugin. You can even hardcode your Adsense username into line 108. I did, but I’m not sure if it really makes any difference. Save and close the file. Again, if you’re editing it outside of the adsense.zip file then you’ll want to copy it back into the components folder, replacing the old version.
7. Rename Adsense.zip to Adsense.xpi: Close all your editor, close the zip file and just rename it back to Adsense.xpi. Now it’s a Firefox extension file again.
8. Double-click on Adsense.xpi: That’s it! Firefox should now try to install Adsense Notifier after a few seconds and once it’s up and running the extension should once again run as it used to!
Now sit back and watch the pennies come rolling in!
One Response to “How To Fix The Firefox Adsense Notifier Plugin”
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xerix32 says:
I wrote a small fix for version and euro, but only italian works with UTF because I dunno which states have euro or dollar in adsense site.
http://www.newsvillage.net/adsense-notifier-ff35.html
NO PLAIN TEXT security problem!!
Please install and try it from other european countries…
November 26th, 2009 at 4:09 am