Server 500 error on Chrome, not on Firefox

Recently had to deal with a perplexing issue in which my PHP script was causing a Internal Server Error, and the message seemed to be browser-specific which made no sense to me at all. Turns out has to do with error reporting. For debugging purposes, the first part of all of my pages reads like this:

//Comment the below off to turn off error warnings
//error_reporting(0);

I always leave it in the file, and I always comment it out. Strangely enough, it sufficed to remove the comment slashes to eliminate the server message. It now reads

error_reporting(0);

and everything is right again. This is especially strange because this error just popped up one day after my site having worked fine for three years with no hiccups. Hopefully it helps someone else out there since I was pulling my hear and teeth out in frustration.