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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T04:11:54+00:00

I have a script that detects Javascript errors on my website and sends them

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I have a script that detects Javascript errors on my website and sends them to my backend for reporting. It reports the first error encountered, the supposed line number, and the time.

EDIT to include doctype:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">

…

<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
// for debugging javascript!
(function(window){
    window.onerror = function(msg, url, ln) {
        //transform errors
        if (typeof(msg) === 'object' && msg.srcElement && msg.target) {
            if(msg.srcElement == '[object HTMLScriptElement]' && msg.target == '[object HTMLScriptElement]'){
                msg = 'Error loading script';
            }else{
                msg = 'Event Error - target:' + msg.target + ' srcElement:' + msg.srcElement;
            }
        }

        msg = msg.toString();

        //ignore errors
        if(msg.indexOf("Location.toString") > -1){
            return;
        }
        if(msg.indexOf("Error loading script") > -1){
            return;
        }

        //report errors
        window.onerror = function(){};
        (new Image()).src = "/jserror.php?msg=" + encodeURIComponent(msg) + "&url=" + encodeURIComponent(url || document.location.toString().replace(/#.*$/, "")) + "&ln=" + parseInt(ln || 0) + "&r=" + (+new Date());
    };
})(window);
//]]>
</script>

Because of this script, I’m acutely aware of any javascript errors that are happening on my site. One of by biggest offenders is “Script Error.” on line 0. in Chrome 10+, and Firefox 3+. This error doesn’t exist (or may be called something else?) in Internet Explorer.

Correction (5/23/2013): This “Script Error, Line 0” error is now showing up in IE7 and possibly other versions of IE. Possibly a result of a recent IE security patch as this behavior previously did not exist.

Does anyone have any idea what this error means or what causes it? It happens on about 0.25% of my overall pageloads, and represents half the reported errors.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The “Script error.” happens in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome when an exception violates the browser’s same-origin policy – i.e. when the error occurs in a script that’s hosted on a domain other than the domain of the current page.

    This behavior is intentional, to prevent scripts from leaking information to external domains. For an example of why this is necessary, imagine accidentally visiting evilsite.com, that serves up a page with <script src="yourbank.com/index.html">. (yes, we’re pointing that script tag at html, not JS). This will result in a script error, but the error is interesting because it can tell us if you’re logged in or not. If you’re logged in, the error might be 'Welcome Fred...' is undefined, whereas if you’re not it might be 'Please Login ...' is undefined. Something along those lines.

    If evilsite.com does this for the top 20 or so bank institutions, they’d have a pretty good idea of which banking sites you visit, and could provide a much more targeted phishing page. (This is just one example, of course. But it illustrates why browsers shouldn’t allow any data to cross domain boundaries.)

    I’ve tested this in the latest versions of Safari, Chrome, and Firefox – they all do this. IE9 does not – it treats x-origin exceptions the same as same-origin ones. (And Opera doesn’t support onerror.)

    From the horses mouth: WebKit source that checks origin when passing exceptions to onerror(). And the Firefox source that checks.

    UPDATE (10/21/11): The Firefox bug that tracks this issue includes a link to the blog post that inspired this behavior.

    UPDATE (12/2/14): You can now enable full cross-domain error reporting on some browsers by specifying a crossorigin attribute on script tags and having the server send the appropriate CORS HTTP response headers.

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