How does Internet Explorer decide when to show its familiar "friendly" error messages, and when to show the web server's own usually more useful and informative error pages? By their size. Not totally unreasonable, I suppose, assuming that if a 500 error (server error) message is less than 512 characters it probably doesn't contain information useful to the end user. But it can make debugging difficult if a broken web server prints diagnostic information and doesn't meet the threshold.
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July 16, 2003
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In Windows IE, at least, that's an option -- Internet Options -> Advanced -> Show friendly HTTP error messages. Does Mac IE not have the same option?
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God how I hate that facking thing. That's one of my biggest peeves with IE. You type something into the address bar, and it brings up a page that spawns a pop-up window. That just seems like unacceptable behavior to me.