Internet Explorer 11 sometimes disables its "Back" button for no apparent reason

Question

Internet Explorer 11 sometimes disables its "Back" button for no apparent reason after clicking a link, some links later it re-enables it, and so on. See screen recording.

The links do not use fancy javascript or strange redirects. Add-Ons are disabled. All browser settings are set to defaults. Cache is empty.

What is the reason that Internet Explorer 11 disables the "Back" button? How can I stop that behavior?

Answer 1

Analysis

I haven't found out the root cause for this strange behavior yet, but it only shows under the following circumstances:

|-------------------------------------------------------------------|
| User is member of local group ...      |    | Back button         |
| Users   | Power Users | Administrators |    | unexpected behavior |
|=========|=============|================|====|=====================|
| Yes     | Yes or No   | Yes            | => | No                  |
|---------|-------------|----------------|----|---------------------|
| Yes     | No          | No             | => | No                  |
|---------|-------------|----------------|----|---------------------|
| Yes     | Yes         | No             | => | Yes                 |
|-------------------------------------------------------------------|

I didn't try other combinations of group memberships. So the unexpected behavior requires the user to be in group Power Users but not Administrators.

Workaround

Since Power Users is a legacy group that is not really being used in Windows 7, we removed users from Power Users (via Group Policy) which stopped the unexpected behavior.

See also this thread from answers.microsoft.com.