Don’t like IE’s default error message pages? Here’s how you can set them to pretty much anything (and how it makes your surfing experience better!)
Don’t like IE’s default error message pages? Here’s how you can set them to pretty much anything (and how it makes your surfing experience better!)
When using Internet Explorer, you may find that it often displays a certain error on a white background when something goes wrong. For instance, if a page is loading, and you press ESC, you IE may display an “Action Canceled” message on a white page. This is especially annoying if you block certain hosts for ads etc (e.g., through a tool such as Spybot Search & Destroy) then the ads appear as this same white text instead.
There are several error pages like this, and in some cases you can customize IE to display an error page of your choosing instead. You can see them in your Internet Explorer by typing the following:
about:blank (default blank page) about:navigationfailure (No Page to Display error) about:navigationcanceled (Action Canceled error) about:postNotCached (Warning Page has Expired error) about:OfflineInformation (Web Page unavailable offline)
Good news: a simple registry tweak can take care of this entirely. Navigate to the following location in your REGEDIT.EXE and you can change the value to be the location of the custom web page of your choice.
Hive: HKEY_LOCAL_Machine Key: Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\AboutURLs Name: varies Data Type: REG_SZ Value: varies
For instance, double-click the NavigationCanceled string, and change the value from “res://shdoclc.dll/navcancl.htm” to “file://c:/my_error.htm“. My suggestion is to have the personalized HTML file nearly blank. I’ve put a “-” inside the file just in case.
After you replace Internet Explorer’s default error messages in the above manner, all the pesky annoying ads, banners, etc will disappear from your surfing experience. It’s addicting!
5 Comments
I tried this and it does change the about: pages.
But images that can’t be load due to ad blocking (or ad host IP set to 127.0.0.1) still shows “Action Canceled” text scattered around the web page.
Is there more to this?
Same problem here.
Hi, this has to be the slowest response in history but what does your “c:\my_error.htm” file say?
I would recommend leaving your hosts file alone and getting a third party, browser-independent ad killer like Ad Muncher which does a superlative job of making the browsing experience almost the same in all three major browsers: IE, Opera, FF. No more mucking around with the registry.
Hi,
I want to customize ie so that when I type some thing in address bar it should search using google rather than using the default msn.