JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 6th Edition

Error Handling

The onerror property of a Window object is an event handler that is invoked when an uncaught exception propagates all the way up the call stack and an error message is about to be displayed in the browser’s JavaScript console. If you assign a function to this property, the function is invoked whenever a JavaScript error occurs in that window: the function you assign becomes an error handler for the window.

For historical reasons, the onerror event handler of the Window object is invoked with three string arguments rather than with the one event object that is normally passed. (Other client-side objects have onerror handlers to handle different error conditions, but these are all regular event handlers that are passed a single event object.) The first argument to window.onerror is a message describing the error. The second argument is a string that contains the URL of the JavaScript code that caused the error. The third argument is the line number within the document where the error occurred.

In addition to those three arguments, the return value of the onerror handler is significant. If the onerror handler returns false, it tells the browser that the handler has handled the error and that no further action is necessary—in other words, the browser should not display its own error message. Unfortunately, for historical reasons, an error handler in Firefox must return true to indicate that it has handled the error.

The onerror handler is a holdover from the early days of ...