IE9 “Pin to Taskbar” Feature - Am I Missing Something?

The new “Pin to Taskbar” feature in IE9 seems to be, on the surface, a neat idea. You can drag the “favicon” of a website down to the (Windows 7) taskbar, and then subsequently launch it like an application with a single click.

There’s only one problem. It’s completely useless. I’m sure I must be missing something head-slappingly simple.

The instance of IE that launches to host the “pinned” site doesn’t seem to load any plugins. The most important plugin (for me) is LastPass, which securely and automatically logs me in to sites using a locally cached password. So, usually, I’d access my Hotmail (for instance) via a bookmark, and I’d be logged in and ready to go, but via an IE9 icon pinned to the taskbar, I’m presented with the login page every time. It doesn’t even have my email address pre-populated (even though I have the “Remember Me” box checked), let alone the password.

So it’s actually several orders of magnitude slower to use a pinned icon, than to just do it the old way, by clicking the IE (or Chrome) icon and then a bookmark.