I think the use of fatalsToBrowser depends on who the site's audience is. For this crowd, I think it's perfectly appropriate: we're not going to get turned off by a technical error message, and are more likely than not to forward all the details fatalsToBrowser (hey, it's better than the default 500 message in Apache) returns to someone in a position to deal with it.

OTOH, I don't think it's appropriate for a site with a general, as opposed to technical, audience. In that case, you NEVER want to return a 500 of any kind. Instead, handle all your errors silently (ie. notify your tech people by email or pager or whatever) and return something innocuous to the browser, like:

*COUGH!*

Our webserver apparently has something stuck in its throat. Please try back in a few minutes.

And your audience will thank you for being candid, yet not boring them with the gory details and instead presenting things in a manner more suited to them.

Spud Zeppelin * spud@spudzeppelin.com