The Internet Explorer 7 browser ships by default with Windows Vista, and although Microsoft is also delivering stand-alone versions via installers designed for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, the browser's integration with Vista is touted among the apexes of security measures from all the mitigations Microsoft built into the platform. Still, when IE7 hit the market in October 2006 for XP, and later in January 2007 with Vista, it did deliver some compatibility issues. And even one month short of its one year anniversary on XP, and after Vista's first seven months on the market, IE7 doesn't play well with others. But in this context, Internet Explorer is not entirely to blame. Sometimes, the fault lies with web developers, failing to optimize their websites for Microsoft's browser.

Case in point: Internet Explorer 7 and Yahoo Music Beta. This marriage produced the wonderful error message included at the bottom of this article, courtesy of Ed Bott. Yahoo Music beta produced an interesting error for me too on the first visit; unfortunately, it also completely killed my copy of Windows Vista Business, and I couldn't make a screenshot. On subsequent visits, I was unable to reproduce the error. Or should I say the exception. Well, IE7 has all the rights to hang back, and play a little catch once in a while with exceptions. And miss.

It seems that Internet Explorer 7 shares this error with JScript .NET, although usually it impacts programs such as Visual Studio and .NET Framework. "Exception thrown and not caught - The code includes a throw statement that is not enclosed within a try block, or the code does not include an associated catch block to trap the error. Exceptions that are thrown from within the try block using the throw statement are caught outside the try block by a catch statement," Microsoft revealed in a description posted on MSDN. Now, in all fairness, Yahoo Music is still in beta stage, so bugs are a given. But while Yahoo will fix its online music destination, with IE7 this is it, until Internet Explorer hits in the second half of 2008.