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After 5 long years, today, Google has removed the BETA from GMail. GMail has been really amazing all these years. Gmail was launched as an invitation-only beta release on April 1, 2004 and it became available to the general public on February 7, 2007.

Even though the BETA is gone now, some people might be missing the BETA logo at their pages. There is an option in labs to enable “back to beta”,  just to have a feel that the BETA is still there.  BETA is gone from the other Google apps too, like, calendar, docs and gtalk.

This is what gmailblog says :

“Some people think we should wait until we launch < one of ongoing secret projects >.

Others say that, over the last five years, a beta culture has grown around web apps, such that the very meaning of “beta” is debatable. And rather than the packaged, stagnant software of decades past, we’re moving to a world of rapid developmental cycles where products like Gmail continue to change indefinitely.

The end result (many visible and invisible changes later) is that today, beta is a thing of the past.”

Now, GMail has a fresh look. Head on to your GMail to see the BETA missing.