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1. Comment - Internet Explorer 7 Beta Goes Gold

   (Jul 28, 2005 - 12:59 PM)

   Note that, generally and historically, "beta" software is software that is functionally complete (or close to being so), semi-debugged to a point of "reasonable" stability, and released to (some subset of) the public for an open testing phase -- sort of a public QA -- wherein it can be tested on more hardware/OS/software configurations that any manufacturer could likely ever test in-house.
   
   Alpha releases are actually very similar to betas, in that is it fairly feature complete, but hasn't yet undergone much debugging, may not be at all stable, and is very much an at-your-own-risk experience.
   
   See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_stage for more about software development stages such as these.
   
   Either way, if the product is in a beta (or even an alpha) release phase (as is IE 7), it is expected that bugs will exist that will be fixed before final release, but that the product's feature set is (very close to) complete and not expected to grow or change much before final release.
   
   Unless, of course, Microsoft is attempting to define the usage of the term "beta"...