window.onerror not working in chrome

Question

I am trying to add an onerror event to my website.

window.onerror = function() {
    alert("an error");
}

But all I receive is:

notThere();
ReferenceError: notThere is not defined

What am I missing?

Browser: Chrome 26.0.1410.64 m

Steps to reproduce:

• add the code to the console.
• add notThere() to the console

Answer 1

The window.onerror works in Chrome (see jsfiddle - http://jsfiddle.net/PWSDF/), but apparently not in the console - which makes some sense.

Answer 2

window.onerror is not triggered when the console directly generates an error. It can be triggered via setTimeout though, e.g., setTimeout(function() { notThere(); }, 0);

Possible duplicate: Chrome: Will an error in code invoked from the dev console trigger window.onerror?

Answer 3

Some other reasons that you may not be able to handle errors in window.onerror (apart from the mentioned ones):

• Another library sets window.onerror after you.

• If you are using Angular, errors wont pass through window.onerror. You have to handle them using this factory:

      .factory('$exceptionHandler', function() {
          return function errorCatcherHandler(exception, cause) {
              console.error(exception);
              if (window.OnClientError) window.OnClientError(exception);
          };
      })
  

See:

https://docs.angularjs.org/api/ng/service/$exceptionHandler

http://bahmutov.calepin.co/catch-all-errors-in-angular-app.html