What is Perpetual Beta? And how is it different from a Traditional beta?Perpetual beta is the keeping of software or a system at the beta development stage for an extended or indefinite period of time. It is often used by developers when they continue to release new features that might not be fully tested. As a result, this could be a much more rapid and agile approach to development, staging, and deployment. In the traditional model, you downloaded a binary, and ran the same binary multiple times. On the web, every time we view a page, we are downloading the content again. This opened the door for the perpetual beta model. In the Perpetual Beta model, features are fully tested before being implemented into the web service. If you see a bug, it’s not supposed to be there, and you should report it. A perpetual beta web service is effectively in beta and released at the same time. That’s why it’s perpetual beta. One of the main characteristics of perpetual beta is to engage your users as real-time testers, and instrument the service so that you know how people use the new features.
The software application i am going to introduce is Internet Explorer 9 beta. Internet Explorer 9 beta was released on 2010-09-15. Just before that, IE9 had a couple of platform previews. And on each preview, some of the notable features are added e.g better JavaScript performance,JavaScript engine integrated into the core browser components and a new icon. After the Internet Explorer 9 beta was released, more notable features are added subsequently. E.g Improved performance, InPrivate Filtering renamed to Tracking Protection, a refined UI, support for more web standards, the option to add a new tab row, and other improvements.
The final version of Internet Explorer 9 was publicly released on March 14, 2011 during the South by Southwest (SXSW) music and film festival in Austin, Texas.
People might think why should we use this application. IE9’s HTML5 video support, the new “Chakra” JavaScript engine, support for new-fangled web technologies like CSS3 and SVG2, and its GPU acceleration makes all the neccessary difference. As for the user interface, it has less browser and ugly toolbars. And new features like one box,download manager and pinned sites. As for the performance, IE9 took 8.9 second to open a browser compared to IE8 9.2 sec which has a slight improvement.
Therefore with IE9‘s improved feature set and interface it’s ultimately going to come down to personal preferences as there are other application thats offers better performance in terms of the speed in opening a browser. E.g Goggle Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_9
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/15/internet-explorer-9-beta-review/
http://salargolestanian.com/BLOG/Software/tabid/570/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/94/HTML5-is-still-experimental-a-little-like-perpetual-beta-version- of-Chrome.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_beta
http://oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html?page=5
xxlesliexx 
thanks for this well written post. I am having big issues getting my head around the whole beta thing. your post has helped me understand a little bit more.
at first i was quite as confused as you, just need to know the difference between traditional beta and perpetual beta, you should be able to grasp the whole idea behind it
I really liked the introduction, it helped me further understand perpetual beta
This is a great post on perpetual beta. I like how you explain it, easy and understandable. I’m not sure if I like IE, though. I haven’t since IE6.