Paul's Comments

People talk about how the new services that Google offers might be dangerous to some of their competitors. Well, I'll tell you right now that as far as I've seen, with the exception of search, Google's stuff is garbage and worthless.

I'm working on a web-based application for a customer that generates pages to print out. This is a multi-page application where after it generates a page it puts in an HTML BR command, along with the instruction to force a page break at that point (<br style="page-break-before:always;"/>). Firefox and Internet Explorer honor the page break; Google Chrome does not. This makes Google Chrome absolutely worthless for use with this application.

While I live in Maryland I'm over in Virginia at my sister's place fixing a problem on her computer, which meant I had to travel all the way over here. So I decided to install VNC on her computer so I can do remote diagnostics over the internet. I'm not sure if I have it on my computer at home so rather than have to find it again I decided to just e-mail the archive files to myself. Only problem is G-Mail will not allow me to mail a zip file that contains an executable file within it. "For Security Reasons". Well, gee, Yahoo! Mail doesn't have that problem; they simply use a scanner to check for viruses. Also, if you try to send a message from a G-Mail account to another e-mail account on a domain where the message is forwarded to another G-Mail account, G-Mail discards the message! And I don't mean dump it into the spam folder, it just plain does not save it.

I get the mail which is sent to paul@paul-robinson.us forwarded to Yahoo! Mail, Go Daddy, which is my registrar, just takes incoming mail and forwards it to me. Yahoo! Mail doesn't care where it came from and I get all of it (some is correctly moved to spam folder). But my sister has her own domain name too, and if a customer of G-Mail tries to send her a message to an e-mail address, on her domain name, G-Mail takes the message and then discards it.

The fact that I can't use G-Mail to send anything - even a Zip file - with an executable or that you can't use it if the recipient and the sender are both on G-Mail if the message is sent to an intervening domain name makes G-Mail absolutely worthless.

So far it looks like anything Google puts out other than search is garbage.