Zen Browser 1.22.3b Ships With a Faster Command Bar and Firefox 156.0.1 Under the Hood
Another point release in a fast-moving 1.22 cycle, but the fixes actually hit pain points.
Zen Browser pushed version 1.22.3b to its stable channel The notes look thin at a glance. Founder Mauro V., who goes by @mr-cheffy across the project, tagged the build and published it the same day. Two headline changes get the spotlight: a sync to Firefox 156.0.1 and a small tweak to how the command bar searches your tabs.
Zen rarely does anything in a straight line though. This is the third incremental update in the 1.22 cycle alone, and those two items sit on top of a longer list of stability fixes aimed squarely at Windows and macOS. That longer list is the actual story.
What actually changed
The main event is the upstream sync. Since Zen forks Firefox, Mozilla ships a new release and the Zen team has to re-apply its own overlay patches, cross its fingers, and ship. This round came with the usual maintainer warning that some patches didn't apply cleanly, which the team then reconciled before releasing. Fine as long as you know it's a routine part of how these forks survive.
The second headline item is the command bar, Zen's quick-jump input that spares you from rummaging through menus. Version 1.22.3b makes it search through tabs and folders more efficiently. If you routinely keep a few dozen tabs spread across nested folders, this is a real speedup rather than a party trick.
The Windows fixes are probably the most useful. Zen was leaking system handles as content processes started and stopped, which quietly eats resources over long sessions. That's patched now. There's also a macOS fix for a quirk that would have you hating your laptop: on macOS 27, windows snapped straight back to maximized whenever you restored them with a title-bar double-click. No more of that.
Smaller repairs fill out the rest. The urlbar context menu was dead (GitHub issue #15437), single-toolbar extension ordering overflowed (#15419), and Compact Mode was blocking add-on installs (#15445). All three fixed.
A calmer internet, on schedule
Zen launched in July 2024 as a free, open-source nod to the Chromium crowd. Its slogan is "a calmer internet," and the pitch leans hard on design and tab management borrowed from Arc and sometimes pushed past it. The Browser Company stopped shipping features for its Arc browser in 2025, leaving a gap Zen has been more than eager to fill. That successor framing has stuck, for better or worse.
The GitHub numbers roughly back the interest: about 44,600 stars and nearly 1,900 forks. Not huge, but climbing, and the whole thing runs on the Mozilla Public License so anyone can dig into the code if they want to.
The 1.22 line has moved briskly. Zen went from Firefox 155.0.1 to 156 to 156.0.1 in roughly three weeks. That cadence is genuinely a selling point for people who want Mozilla's security patches faster than their distro's package manager tends to hand them out.
The press has been kind lately. Adam Conway at XDA Developers described Zen as a mix of Floorp, Vivaldi, and Chrome, and named DRM-content incompatibility as its one real weakness. Liam Proven of The Register liked that it's free of Google code and still runs on older operating systems. Jack Wallen at ZDNet pointed at the depth of the Zen Mods store.
Keep in mind that Zen has no mobile version yet, and it sticks to a rolling-release model even on its "stable" channel. You know what you're signing up for before you hit download.
Where to grab it
The update is out now. Head here to download the release from GitHub.
