“There’s places in Eastern Europe, Indonesia, China where huge amounts of people are leap-frogging desktops altogether and going straight on to browsing on phones. In those places 2.5G is going to be around for a while, and it’s about giving them a choice.”

There’s something in this. I spent a year of my life living in China and the culture surrounding the desktop is very different to Europe. Chinese people get incredibly subsidised packages on mobiles, and the network charges are buttons. Computers, on the other hand, remain expensive. As a result there’s a huge swathe of people using their phones to browse, and not touching the desktop at all. When they do, it’s generally in internet cafes and for gaming, meaning the browser doesn’t get a look in. This is now a cultural thing, a way of seeing the desktop computer and its potential uses. It’s also unlikely to change in the near future.

Mateu argued, fairly convincingly, that the way around this was not to get hung up on desktops but to stick your browser on the things that are appearing in the living room. The Wii, the DS, the set-top box. In this scenario, the consequences for the browser are intruiging, because the key to making browsers work on these sorts of devices is to make them as abstract as possible. And therein, lays a problem. How do you build brand recognition for something that, if it’s working properly, will be basically invisible to the end user? 

Chrome is one of the first browsers we’ve seen that really pares back the browser. Google can get away with this, because it’s brand is already so strong. Also, because the browser isn’t the goal, it’ just a better method of serving its other products such as Google Docs. It wants to make you oblivious to the browser, but smaller names, such as Opera, can’t pull the same trick.

According to Opera’s web evangelist Bruce Lawson, the introduction of Chrome wasn’t something that caught it by surprise, nor something that it’s worried by: “The writing was on the wall when it started creating all those javascript heavy applications. People spend eight hours a day on the internet, but not browsing. They spend it on applications, and Google had to ensure they got the best experience on those applications…”

It’s strange to think that Opera isn’t actually fighting in the browser wars at all, it’s fighting its own very specific battles, against nobody at all. Just look at the big innovation in Opera 9.6, the “low bandwith” mode, which allows users to pick and choose which parts of an email or page to display. That’s clearly not aimed at Europe, or the West, it’s aimed at China, Indonesia, South Africa – lands of mass adoption but terrible connections. 

The majority of these users aren’t spending eight hours on Google Docs, they surfing on mobiles, or through the Wii. When Lawson says Chrome isn’t competing with Opera, I believe him, because I think where Opera is being succesful is in catering to those markets that seem niche to the western world. Lawson also reckons the IE development team are the worse drinkers on the circuit. I believe that, too.

Fast-forward four and half years and guess what? Google Mail, as it’s now known, still has that little BETA label under it, and it shows no sign of buggering off.

Over at the Royal Pingdom they’ve gone through the whole Google catalog and counted the applications that are in beta today. While 22 out of 49 may sound reasonable – Google is always coming up with innovations, after all – when you realise that these include Google Mail, Docs, and Product Search, you have to wonder if Google interprets the word beta in the same way as the rest of us.

The chaps over at Network World thought exactly the same thing, so they put it to Google: what exactly does beta mean to your product development cycle? The answer says a lot about how online computing is changing the way we go about things.

“We believe beta has a different meaning when applied to applications on the Web, where people expect continual improvements in a product.  On the Web, you don’t have to wait for the next version to be on the shelf or an update to become available.  Improvements are rolled out as they’re developed.  Rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we’re moving to a world of regular updates and constant feature refinement where applications live in the cloud.”

So Google’s online products are constantly evolving things, that much is obvious to anyone who’s used them – but by this logic those beta labels won’t ever be removed. In ten years time Google Mail (BETA) will be the most complete in-progress software available, and Chrome (BETA) will still be the new kid on the block next to the arthritic Internet Explorer 18 and Firefox XIII.

Maybe it’s a perception thing, with Google afraid of looking like one of the boring mainstream. Or perhaps it just likes the cushion those beta labels afford it should anything go wrong. Either way, Google’s own NeverEnding Story is beginning to get a little bit silly.

What I don’t like is what happens when some requester leaps up while I’m typing and steals focus from the window I was typing into.

It’s not just the sheer rudeness of the interruption, though that’s obnoxious enough. The big problem is that – well, call me bourgeois, but when I’m typing I sometimes like to hit the space bar between words. And I type fairly quickly, and I don’t always look at the screen as I’m doing so; and so, when a requester suddenly leaps to the fore, I frequently end up hitting the space bar before I’ve noticed it.

The requester, of course, knows nothing and cares less about what I was doing before it appeared. Thinking only of itself, it presumes that my pressing space must constitute carte blanche for it to launch immediately into whatever idiotic behaviour some dullard thought would make a good default action… and lo, my computer is away and there’s no telling what might happen.

It’s particularly annoying when it’s IE7 telling me a download has completed. Never mind that already, right at the start of the process, I clicked the button to run the application after downloading. Once it arrives, Internet Explorer interrupts me with a second requester asking the same question again – and, in flagrant disregard of the decision I have already indicated, the default option is ‘don’t run.’

And so, when, as is inevitable, I inadvertently ‘choose’ the default option, the requester simply closes. Cue a lengthy search of my hard disk for the installation file, which generally turns out to be in a hidden directory buried eight levels down from the root, with a forty character name that’s just a string of hex numbers.

Sometimes I think we should go back to QDOS. No multi-tasking, no directories. Just think of the productivity gains.