Are custom 404 pages required now?
<p>I was experimenting with 404 responses. Consider the following in an asp.net web api controller:</p>

<pre><code>    // GET api/values
    public IHttpActionResult Get()
    {
       return NotFound();
    }
</code></pre>

<p>So when I go to <code>http://localhost:51922/api/values</code> it returns a 404 response with no content (apparently this bypasses the built-in asp.net 404 responses too). In IE11, I get a default not found page supplied by the browser:<a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/XbcEZ.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/XbcEZ.png" alt="enter image description here"></a> but in Chrome I just get a blank page. In the dev tools you can see that Chrome got the 404 response, but then just didn't show anything at all. </p>

<p>A lot of older comments like <a href="https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/IL13nt9cDLA" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> said that Chrome would show it's own default 404 page if the response was less than 512 bytes, but in my test that appears to no longer be true (response was 358B). Does Chrome now just display the 404 response content even if the content is empty?</p>

<p>I once read that it was sometimes best not to send custom 404 pages because every browser has a default 404 message, users understand what they mean, and the page usually just chews up network traffic while providing no helpful information to users. Opinions differ on that, of course, but if some browsers don't have any default 404 page then we really have no choice but to send custom 404 pages.</p>