Replace and Customize IE Error Screens

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: SoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerAboutURLs
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!