404 displayed in IE

notanotherbug — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:49:46 +0000

So, today we created a custom 404 page for the website we are working on and posted the release. I tested on FF and worked pretty well (the page is just a static html page that redirects to another custom page). Anyway, we got a bug on this with the following description:

The page works fine in Firefox, but in Internet Explorer it shows the standard 404 page

Wtf? I checked on my development environment and, yes, the tester was right! For IE, the standard 404 page was displayed… although the breakpoint that i placed in the 404 page was hit. So the custom page was sent to the browser (I knew that because in FF was working!!!).

P.S. For all of you that do not know how a standard 404 page in IE is shown, here’s a glance:

404_displayed_in_ie

What to do, what to do?! I searched google and i found the following sentence:

In case of an error ie will show its own error page when yours in not large enough. I think the limit is around 512 bytes or so (configurable in ie somewhere).

yeap… i didn’t knew that! So, i placed an hidden div with lots of chunk in it and now it works!

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404 displayed in IE