680447 - Pages returning empty 404 errors give no visual indication what happened

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 482874

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, defect)

Description

[Gian-Carlo Pascutto [:gcp]]

Example:

load in any Firefox version
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/yahoo-vs-google-1996-to-2005.png

You will get a blank page, without any feedback what happened. For most users, the reflex will be to reload the page as it looks like the network hiccuped. Failing that, we might conclude the website is down.

I needed Firebug in this case to actually figure out it's a 404 error and no amount of reloading is going to fix it. 

The issue here is that the page is sending a Content-Length: 0 reply. It probably could have returned anything that doesn't result in a visual display to get the same result (a webpage without a body for example).

Checking with other browsers shows that Chrome behaves the same. Only Internet Explorer gives the user a meaningful error message saying the page cannot be found.