PHP 4.0.4 RC4 is now available for download. Going through the list of changes, I found these to be some of the more significant:

• Fixed bad mod_perl interaction which caused segfaults when using LFS
• Added transparent gzip compression support
• Added 'r' flag to date() which generates an RFC822 formatted date, e.g. "Thu, 9 Nov 2000 16:33:01 -0500"
• Fixed mysql_close(), pg_close(), msql_close() and sybase_close() - they weren't properly closing the SQL connections
• Added IIS Admin extension

The only thing you'll notice is that it's source code only. No binaries here. If you're not a Visual C++ guru, Windows users will have to wait for a binary distribution. One place to check for binary development releases is php4win.

So what are you waiting for? Go get it! (yes, I know phphead.com posted it too - heh)