Zen’s latest update adds multiple media controls, faster startup, and smarter compact mode

Zen Browser has pushed out another stable update (v1.21.11b), and while a chunk of it is bug fixing, there are a few genuinely useful additions worth knowing about. The headline change for a lot of people will be media controls, since you can now run more than one at a time in the sidebar.

If you have a YouTube video going in one tab and music playing in another, each gets its own set of controls instead of fighting over a single player. The Zen team says this is “something people have been wanting for a long time,” and judging by the reaction on the Reddit thread where they announced the release, it looks like users are happy with the change.

That media change is part of a wider push to make Zen feel less fiddly day to day, which has been the general direction ever since the browser crossed 500,000 users back in June. That said, there are some quirks with the update that need to be ironed out, which is why the devs are asking for feedback.

Looking for feedback for the latest release!
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Now, coming to another important change. The changelog points out that the update brings “improved startup performance and feeling.” While that is vague, it fits with the reliability work from the previous stable release that was mostly bug fixes. Alongside it, Zen fixed audio and video that would fail to play or hang when you tried to seek on sites that load media from a Blob URL, which is the kind of annoying, hard-to-explain bug that quietly ruins streaming.

Compact mode is the third piece, and it now tracks your mouse even after the cursor leaves the window. The sidebar sticks around while you hover near the edge and only tucks away once you move further out, on Windows and macOS at least. We first tried this out when it landed in the Twilight beta a few days ago, and it does fix the mild irritation of the sidebar vanishing the second you drift slightly away from the window.

There is more coming, too. The team has been teasing a bigger shift for a while, and cross-device sync sits near the top of the wish list, a feature Zen hinted at when it marked its two-year anniversary.

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