Phi 2.13.0

Phi Browser 2.13 is mostly about the things that keep going while you look at something else. Netflix now plays, the music in another tab can be paused without a search party, and your assistant can keep an eye on a page so you don't have to. Underneath it all, Phi now runs on Chromium 154, and we're tracking upstream Chromium releases much more closely from here on. Chromium ships often; we intend to keep step.

Phi now supports Widevine, the DRM that many streaming services rely on, so Netflix and other protected video play right in Phi. Until now the honest answer to "can I watch this here?" was "yes, in some other browser." We've retired that answer.

When media is playing in a background tab, a Mini Player now sits at the bottom of the sidebar with play and pause, skip, and volume, plus a click on the site icon to jump back to the tab. Hover to expand it for the title and a progress bar you can scrub, and swipe between sources when more than one thing is playing. You can choose how it behaves, or switch it off, under Settings > Advanced > Mini Player.

Say the restaurant you've been trying to book for a month releases its next batch of tables "sometime this week," with no hint of when. Open its page, right-click, and ask your assistant to watch it; the menu item carries whatever name you gave your assistant. It asks what you're waiting for, sets up a scheduled task, and tells you when the page changes, so you can stop hitting refresh between meetings. Tasks also have their own place in Phi Chat now, and they stay connected to the conversation that created them and the page they started from.

The Stop button now actually stops. Generation ends on the spot, and if you stop before a reply appears, your message goes back into the input box so you can rephrase rather than retype. Sidebar chat and Phi Chat also get improvements to long conversations and Chat with Tabs, and reopening a closed tab with Command-Shift-T brings its chat back too.

One thing worth knowing if you use sync: deleting a Profile now removes it from your other synced devices as well, not just the Mac in front of you. Sync is still experimental, and it now copes better with devices that go offline or change at the same time.

Elsewhere, you can search a site straight from the address bar by typing its shortcut and pressing Tab or Space, as requested on GitHub. Reader View's read-aloud can now use Microsoft's online voices; it's off by default, and when you turn it on, the text being read is sent to Microsoft to produce the speech. Peek View, Reader View, and Split View now open into one another, and you can capture a whole page as a single screenshot. Widgets, Phi Sentinel, and switching to Incognito Spaces all get improvements, and we've fixed a few crashes and a handful of smaller annoyances, including Chrome bookmark import.

Most of 2.13 happens in the background, which is rather the point: the film plays, the page gets watched, and the controls stay within reach. Software that waits on you, instead of the other way around.