A user was complaining that they could not access a web page. The initial impression was that it was being blocked. I bypassed the proxy mechanism in place that normally restricts web traffic but saw that the page still could not be loaded. The message alluded to something locally installed that may be the culprit, but this was really just a generic “catch-all” error message: “Is feedly blocked? Feedly is not able to load. It is probably because one of your extensions is blocking it…”

I decided to load up the Developer Tools in IE to see if it was problem with the script in the web page. To do this, just press F12 or go to Tools > F12 Developer Tools. Afterwards, select the Script tab and select the option to Start debugging. I selected the hyperlink in the right portion of the debug window and it took the cursor to the problem part of the javascript code.

Don’t worry, you don’t necessarily need to be a program-code debugger to figure this out. That what the Internet and your favorite search engine is for. Searching the debug error Expected identifier, string or number IE9 turned up two top hits that pointed out that a trailing comma after an object or array is a bad idea and that IE9 specifically cannot handle this problem script.

The workaround is to use an alternative browser like FireFox or Chrome (they are not as restrictive with malformed javascript). Internet Explorer 10 or 11 also seems to be handle this problem more gracefully, too, and allowed the page to load normally.