Zen Browser v1.23.4b blocks compromised eMudhra certificates and adds new Boosts Focus

The v1.23.4b stable build came out recently for the Zen browser. It’s mostly a maintenance release, and the biggest change is a security update that improves protection against the recently compromised eMudhra certificates. It also includes some quality-of-life improvements that first appeared in Twilight.

Zen published an entire list in the official changelog, and you can view a partial screenshot attached below. The actual list is quite long.

I checked for this update, and sure enough, it began installing after I clicked on “About Zen.”

Here are the important changes:

1. Security: eMudhra certificate blocks: It’s worldwide news that private keys for eight eMudhra intermediate certificates had been compromised. The company immediately pushed blocks via OneCRL, and most Firefox users were provided with a fix within hours, without needing to even restart the browser. This Zen update embeds the updated OneCRL update directly.
2. Sidebar: It’ll continue to stay open even while the mouse is over it. Sometimes, in Compact Mode, or when auto-hide was enabled, the sidebar would collapse even though the pointer was on top of it. This was specifically an issue on Linux. The hover detection is more reliable now.
3. DevTools work properly on Glance tabs: Opening Developer Tools (Inspect Element) on a Glance preview used to produce a black screen or fail to show the tools properly. This issue has been patched.
4. Boosts Zap bar pushes page content up.
5. Sidebar scroll position is now preserved after a fullscreen: Exciting fullscreen used to reset the sidebar scroll position to the top before.
6. Multiple windows no longer launch on startup for Linux and Windows. On some systems, Zen used to open two or more windows every time it started.
7. It also includes various crash fixes, such as issues with Windows when saving a page as a PDF. Zen browser windows no longer open on the wrong monitor for multi-monitor setups (on Linux).
8. On macOS, dragging files into the browser from other apps works correctly. External links are also routed properly through Space Routing on startup.
9. Boosts Focus: Boosts now include a Focus option that lets you focus on a specific part of a website while you’re customizing it.
10. Performance: Windows builds use PGO (Profile-Guided Optimization), which improves startup times and responsiveness.
11. Update to Firefox v158.0.1.

If you want to read the entire changelog, you can find it here. I have only highlighted the most important changes in the update.

In case you missed it, a lot of these improvements were previously available in a Twilight update, which we covered here.

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