Phi 2.8.0

Phi Browser 2.8 is here, and this one is largely about going somewhere without necessarily going somewhere. Links can now open in Kiosk, pages can appear in Peek, Reader View has been improved, and Split View has learned a new direction. Browsers, apparently, were not geometrically complicated enough.

Kiosk is our new lightweight floating browser window for quick, temporary browsing without adding another tab to your life. It also acts as a buffer zone between Phi and the outside world: links opened from other apps land in Kiosk first, rather than being dropped into one of your Spaces before you've decided where they belong. If you've set up URL rules, those still take priority and links will go straight where you've told them to. Otherwise, browse away in Kiosk or move the page into a Space when it earns a permanent home.

Peek gives links somewhere temporary to go without disturbing the page underneath. Click a link from a pinned tab or bookmark and it opens in an overlay, so the thing you pinned stays exactly where you pinned it. You can also hold Shift while clicking a link from any regular tab to open it in Peek. Useful for references, side quests, suspiciously interesting links, and all the other things that somehow turn one tab into seventeen.

Split View now supports vertical splitting too, so alongside the familiar left-and-right layout, you can stack two pages top and bottom. Sometimes width is precious, sometimes height is plentiful, and sometimes two websites simply look less ridiculous on top of each other.

Reader View has also had some attention. It now does a better job of turning supported articles into a calm, distraction-free reading experience, with improved presentation and layout controls. The web remains determined to put six newsletters and a floating video between you and paragraph three, so we continue to resist.

The sidebar chat experience now shows live response speed and timing details, for anyone who enjoys watching milliseconds with the seriousness normally reserved for Formula 1 timing screens. We also fixed Agent color adjustments occasionally making website text unreadable, and restored version-update notifications in Comfortable mode.

Kiosk for the temporary stuff, Peek for the quick detours, Split View in whichever direction makes sense, and fewer reasons for your actual tabs to wander off and become something else. Phi 2.8 is mostly about keeping things where they belong, which turns out to be a surprisingly ambitious goal for a browser.