It turns out that the previous and current versions of IDLE syntax highlighting did not recognize literals with valid two-character prefixes, like "ur" or "br".  Besides restoring "ur", 3.3 also added "rb" to the existing "br" prefixes.  The applied patch explicitly matches any of the prefixes documented in the 3.3 language reference:

http://docs.python.org/dev/reference/lexical_analysis.html#string-and-bytes-literals