Fran's Blog

Today Gmail went down. It’s hit the news again (tech news that is). On Pocket Lint they had a short article on the outage. It attracted a comment from a person saying “I also love gmail but I’m a bit worried about the fact that it’s still in beta!”.

I’ve seen this kind of quote quite a lot. And it’s an acceptable thing to say, it is in beta. However, Google have changed the meaning of the word Beta. Back in the day with traditional software development, an application would go through Alpha, Beta, Release Candidates then final or something similar (it still does, and will for years to come). Alpha and beta would be for testers and those who dared to install and potentially destroy their machines.

The reason Google use “Beta” is the platform has changed. You don’t install web applications, you just use them. If it gets upgraded, they do it and you reap the benefits. This also means the software isn’t ever final. It can be updated as much as daily, and they don’t even need to tell you. Conversely, for desktop applications, you will probably install once, maybe update the software once a month at most, but even then you have to give permission and will probably not even install the latest version especially not if it is a test version of the software.

Beta has lost the “test version only, use at your peril” badge for web applications. However, Google Chrome, Google’s web browser, has had to come out of beta, it is a desktop application, and all the other browsers out there ask for only testers or the fool-hardy to use beta versions.

So, the term Beta on the web, has a slightly different definition, it just means “this application is being improved constantly” rather than “don’t use, this is just not reliable”.