I understand the dilemma, you're trying to run unreliable code and want it to do the least damage possible. However, what should jQuery do with the error generated? Discard it? That would make debugging difficult. All of the browser's debuggers generate error messages with specific problems and line numbers for this case, and much of that is lost when the function is wrapped in a try/catch.

Libraries should not have surprising behaviour.

jQuery eating up exceptions (or rethrowing them asyncronously) during initialiasation would be surprising and incovenient to most users.

A higher level ''framework'' might be expected to have unbreakable initialisation of "portlets", but for a library meant for evening out the playing field of browsers and work with DOM, this would be a mistake.

I'd suggest that you replace the .ready() method to add your own portal error handling, and have it call the original .ready() method with a new function that wraps a try/catch around the caller's original function. That way you can integrate the error handling and/or reporting into your portal. We can't do that from our perspective.