Eight Steps To Get Firefox To Work With IBD Daily Charts
Introduction To IBD Newspaper
If you have an Investors Business Daily (IBD) subscription, you probably have used the IBD daily charts. If you are unfamiliar with IBD, it is a financial newspaper that provides investors with price and volume information on stocks, bonds, options, commodities, etc. as well as reporting on various business topics going on in the market place.
IBD Stock Charts
As a subscriber, one of the benefits of Investors.com is being able to view IBD daily and weekly charts. These are graphical charts that give you up-to-date stock information. A typical presentation is the candlestick chart that gives you a high price, a low price and a closing price per day or per week depending on the chart that you are viewing. Investors.com was built mainly on the Microsoft platform. And as a result, the IBD daily and IBD weekly charts use Microsoft ActiveX controls to display those charts and until recently only Internet Explorer has been the only supported browser. Other browsers such as Firefox and Safari do not normally support the ActiveX controls and hence do not work.
Firefox Can Display IBD Stock Charts
As an IBD subscriber myself, I was delighted to see that Firefox now works with IBD charts as long as you install Microsoft (MS) Silverlight v40. So what is this? Silverlight is a .Net platform plugin that works with other browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and a few others.
How Do You Install The Silverlight Plugin?
Step 1. You will need to login to your IBD Account at Investors.com using Firefox
Step 2. Go to the Stocks On The Move page if you’re not already there.
Step 3. Click on the stock chart icon (where I have my red arrow)
Step 4. A new window should appear with a prompt for you to download the Silverlight Plugin
Step 5. Click the Click Now To Install button. You will be prompted to download the file to your local drive. Go ahead and download a copy of the plugin to your Desktop. You can close the
Silverlight Plugin Install window.
Step 6. Go to your Desktop and install the plugin. You should receive a successful installation
message when done.
Step 7. Now go back to your Stocks On The Move screen and click on the stock chart icon again. This time you should see the daily stock chart appear.
Step 8. Next, click on the Weekly chart button. The weekly stock chart should appear. Note that if you left mouse click on any one of the candlesticks, a popup window will appear with the familiar high price, low price and closing price for the week popup (Note: The popup is not displaying in any of my screen captures.) By the way, the Silverlight plugin also works with Safari v5.0. 
How Do I Uninstall The Silverlight Plugin?
Now that you have it installed and the stock charts are displaying nicely, why would you want to uninstall the plugin you ask? Reading the blogs about Silverlight, it may not be compatible with other sites that you visit. How can you tell? The behavior that you’re used to on particular sites that you visit will not work properly. If you run into this, simply uninstall the plugin. Since you have downloaded the program, on a Mac it would be Silverlight.dmg, you can reinstall it anytime you need it. But if you do install and uninstall it several times over a period of time, you will need to exit out of Firefox and then reload it to start from a clean slate. Do this especially if you just uninstalled it and things do not work as you expected.
Here are four steps to uninstall the plugin from a Mac
Step 1. Open Finder and go to the ../Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ directory
Step 2. Highlight the Silverlight.plugin and then right click and click on Move to Trash. For earlier versions of Silverlight you may also need to remove the Silverlight .pkg object in the ../Library/Receipts directory, but if you do not find it there, don’t worry about it.
Step 3. To test the uninstall, go back to the Stocks On The Move screen and click on the
stock chart icon now. The screen will be blank.
Step 4. If for some reason you cannot find your copy of the plugin (.dmg) to install, you can get the Silverlight install screen back by refreshing Firefox. Exit out and reload firefox. Then login to Investors.com and now click on the stock chart icon. You should receive the Silverlight Install screen.
Configuration Information:
Here is configuration information for the combination that works on my Mac.
Macbook Pro running Mac OS X v10.6.4
Firefox v3.6.6
Safari v5.0
Microsoft Silverlight v4.0
If you have any questions or comments, reply to this post. . . . Tom
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Tom – I was so disappointed to discover that charts don’t work on my brand new mac book pro. I just tried downloading Silverlight. I followed the instructions provided on the Microsoft website (I wasn’t prompted to download it within the IBD site)…any ideas what I might be missing?
Kelly,
I’m assuming you are using Firefox v3.6.x and have Mac OS X v10.6.x on your Mac.
The first thing I would verify is to see that the Silverlight plugin was installed on your Mac. Look in your ../Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ folder
and see whether the Silverlight.plugin is there. My guess is it will not be. But if it is, delete it. Undo the Silverlight installation that you did
from the MS website. Try this:
1) Log into Investors.com
2) Do a search on any stock — say aapl (Apple)
3) click on the stock chart icon
4) The stock chart window should come up blank, close it.
5) Open a new Firefox window and insert this link as the url: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=149156&v=4.0.50401.0
6) This is the link for the Silverlight plugin install button.
7) Download the plugin .dmg to your desktop. Then install it.
8 ) Now try the Apple stock chart and see whether the chart comes up.
9) If you need more installation details, refer to my article.
10) Let me know if you were successful. Good luck!