IE9 RC bug? page changes IE back/forward colors and prepends icon, maintained for window session
Strange IE9 RC bug: visited http://www.vodafone.gr/portal/client/cms/viewCmsPage.action?pageId=0515 (via http://bit.ly/vodafone1kai1_xatzigiannis) and then clicked back several times seeing the above strange back/forward buttons (red color) and a Vodafone icon prefixed before them! Closing the window fixed the issue.
Are they using some hidden feature of IE9? Didn’t manage to reproduce the behavior though. If you have more info on this issue, do add comment below.
UPDATE: I think I found the culpit, drag-dropping the page icon from the address bar onto the desktop with IE9 RC doesn’t create a URL shortcut (.url file) as it used to be at IE8, but creates a pinned site shortcut (.website file) and immediately closes the tab/page and reopens it in a new window with the UI appearance shown above (back/forward button colors depend on the page icon dominant color I think). Totally non-intuitive (esp. breaks the rule of “least user surprise”), plus much more slower. Read more on this at https://zoomicon.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/more-ie9-rc-issues-tale-of-two-internet-shortcuts/ (also reported as an issue to Microsoft Connect at https://connect.microsoft.com/IE/feedback/details/644557/drag-dropping-page-icon-from-address-bar-to-the-desktop-issues)
George Birbilis @zoomicon 
It’s the same feature where you pin a page/application on the taskbar by dragging the tab there. For some reason it was triggered on the page although you don’t have it pinned. It’s not a hidden feature. It’s documented everywhere. The probable bug is that it was triggered without you having it actually pinned on your taskbar.
Classic Microsoft response from the past: “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature” 🙂
Thanks for the tip (seems the buttons take the dominant color of the page icon or something, since for http://zoomicon.com when pinned I get black back/forward buttons).
I should have posted a screenshot showing the whole screen. I had nothing pinned. Just went to that page and it was showing with red back/forward and the icon at the left as if it was pinned to taskbar. Even worse, I pressed back and it kept on showing this till I closed that window. With pinning you’d expect the pinned page to be the first in the history (like a virtual HTML application that allows you to go back to “home” [the pinned page] at anytime), not the last (more recent) one.
Definitely looks like a bug. Haven’t examined that page’s source-code to see if it does something special. I’m pretty sure I had visited that link from some post on facebook (or maybe it was an ad on facebook?). Unfortunately haven’t made it to reproduce the behaviour (apart from when doing the pinning action you mentioned, but then the pinned page is first [older] in history as I mentioned above, not last [newest] when you do back/forward).
To reproduce the “bug” just open the url, pin it on your taskbar by dragging the tab there, and then open the page from there. The arrows will be red and the logo of VF will be on the left, next to the Back button. More info here -> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/dd797411
the “bug” is they also implemented this when you drag-drop the URL onto the desktop or into some folder to store it (since using the favorites dialog on IE with lots of favs is too slow)
there’s a solution to disable this (unfortunately disables standalone site pinning on taskbar too [pins as item under pinned IE icon], not only disabling the pin when drop on desktop/folder) posted by a reader of the blog:
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/151853-internet-explorer-9-enable-disable-ability-pin-sites.html
some reader suggested holding down SHIFT – Thanks for the tip. Very badly implemented workarround though, IF YOU DON’T PRESS SHIFT at start of drag and hold it down later on before drop, it doesn’t work. Breaks rule of least-user-surprise to introduce such variation from common drag-and-drop patterns that are being used on Windows (e.g. for Copy the CTRL and for Move the SHIFT can be held down just before drop)