How to make Visio viewer work on Internet Explorer 9

Problem

I have trouble getting the Visio viewer control to work on Internet Explorer (IE) 9 (including the FireFox IE tab and Chrome IE tab browser extensions). Regardless of the IE security options given, the control does not download automatically.

Steps

For Windows 7, the perform the following actions:

1. Go to the Microsoft Visio Viewer download site and install the viewer directly.

2. Restart IE (This is an important step! Do not skip doing this).

3. Test on IE with the Visio viewer test (the test is not dependent on the Visio for Confluence app). If it works here, then it must work in Confluence also. As the test works with IE, it would also work in FireFox IE tab and Chrome IE tab extensions. 

References

Google for visio activex IE9 or similar to find a few references about the things that must be done like making sure ActiveX filtering is off, and making a file association for .vsd files with IE. In particular, with the steps above, you do not need to touch the ActiveX filtering option.