Phi 2.17.0

Two tabs side by side was a fine idea. This week Split View learns to count to four, and the rest of Phi Browser 2.17 is the kind of small, specific work that comes from reading your GitHub issues with a cup of coffee: a lighter Kiosk, a Tab Switcher that crosses Spaces, pinned tabs that stay awake, and sidebar buttons you can hide. Underneath it all we moved to the newest Chromium build, which patches the latest known CVEs. That has been our weekly ritual for a while now, and it will stay one.

Split View now holds up to four tabs, side by side or stacked. The responsible use case is a document, its source, a spreadsheet and a chat. The real one is four X timelines at once: doomscrolling, now with adrenaline. Drag a tab onto a split and Phi Browser shows where it will land: Add Left, Add Right, Add Top, Add Bottom, Add Here between two panes, or Replace. Each pane has a handle for dragging it to a new spot, and the right-click menu can move the focused pane or close the whole split. Option-click a link inside a split and it opens in a new pane, or in a new tab once all four seats are taken. Splits saved as pinned tabs or bookmarks keep every pane, and rearranging one updates what was saved.

You're in another app, someone sends a link, and all you want is one page for one minute. New Kiosk used to answer with a full window and an empty address bar. Now it opens a small search bar near the top of your screen, wherever you are, and the Kiosk appears beside it only after you pick a destination. Change your mind and nothing opens. Links arriving from other apps no longer pile up on the exact same spot, and the Kiosk toolbar has slimmed down. This one was asked for on GitHub. So were the next three👇

The Tab Switcher can now reach across Spaces: turn on Tab Switcher includes all Spaces in Settings > Spaces, and Control-Tab cycles through recent tabs in every Space of the same profile, switching Spaces when it needs to. It arrived as a pull request from the community, which is our favorite way for a feature to arrive. When a pinned tab or bookmark has wandered off to a different address, right-click it and choose Replace Saved URL with Current to make the new address the one it keeps. And if your pinned Slack or Discord reloads from scratch every time you come back from lunch, Settings > Advanced has a new Keep pinned tabs loaded switch.

The row of buttons at the bottom of the sidebar is now yours to edit. Right-click the sidebar, open Bottom Buttons, and choose which of Profile, Downloads, Memory and Feedback you want to see. Chat stays. The Comfortable layout gets the same choice under Toolbar Buttons. Yeah, you can now remove the 🐞 icon if it does really hurts eyes, no offence taken.

Two housekeeping notices. The local backups Phi Browser made during the move from 1.6 to 2.0 have done their job: this release deletes them and removes the Time Machine Backups entry from the Help menu. And the official Phi Telegram bot has been retired, so Phi Link now connects through a Telegram bot of your own; if you were using the official one, Settings will walk you through the switch.

Elsewhere: Phi Browser can be set as the default app for PDFs, images and other common file types. The View menu has an Appearance submenu for System, Light and Dark. A picture-in-picture window dragged off the edge of the screen comes back. Extension popups appear over a full-screen window, where you can see them, and Proton Pass opens at its proper size again. The menu bar icon shows a red dot when a page it is watching has news. We also trimmed off a few more of Chromium's built-in Google services, so the browser makes fewer background requests. And the "Chrome was updated" bubble that greeted some of you after the last update is gone. It was wrong on at least one count.

None of this will make a keynote. But four panes on an ultrawide monitor is a genuinely nice way to work, and most of the rest exists because one of you took five minutes to write it down. Keep doing that. Meanwhile, open the About window and give the conch a spin.