[forgetfulness]

It'd make the zoom level you see jump up and down depending on whether you lose your connection or regain it, this is less jarring.

You could say that Chrome is designed to tie the zoom level to the viewport but I wouldn't count on this behavior springing up from an underlying design and implementation rather than it being a design choice for the user experience.

[taeric]

I'm not sure I follow. If the page is constantly bouncing to the no connection page, it is jarring, period. If the page of my "no connection" changes because of the address in trying, that is jarring if the problem is on my end.

That is, consider your network is down. You try to go to an address. It doesn't load, so you try another address, the page changes; but it is the same content.

[forgetfulness]

Is it important that the no connection message be an HTML document treated like others in the web browser? If browsers used to model it that way and you saw behaviors corresponding to the switching of a webpage, it was arbitrary too, and in this case, would cause more disruption.