Zen Browser Workspaces & Compact Mode Shortcuts

Creating a new Workspace (Ctrl+Shift+A on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+A on Mac, though this binding has shifted across Zen releases) opens a prompt for naming the new Workspace and, in most builds, choosing an accent color and icon for it. Each Workspace then holds its own completely independent set of open tabs — closing every tab in one Workspace doesn't touch what's open in another, which is the core value proposition: a genuinely separate browsing context rather than just a labeled group within one shared tab list. Switching between Workspaces (the next/previous shortcuts, which vary somewhat by platform and version) replaces the entire visible tab set with whatever belongs to the Workspace you land on. This is meaningfully different from switching tabs within a single Workspace — it's closer to switching between entirely different browser sessions than to Ctrl+Tab cycling through tabs, since the whole sidebar or tab bar's contents change at once rather than just moving a highlight along a list. A genuinely common Workspace pattern: one Workspace for focused work-related browsing (documentation, a project management tool, a handful of reference tabs), a separate Workspace for personal browsing (social media, shopping, casual reading), and switching between them at the start and end of a work session rather than letting both contexts' tabs pile up together in one undifferentiated list. This isolation also has a practical side benefit for people prone to tab hoarding — a Workspace dedicated to a specific short-term project can simply be closed entirely once that project wraps, without needing to individually identify and close each of its tabs from within a much larger mixed list. Toggling the sidebar (Ctrl+B / Cmd+B) shows or hides the vertical panel that hosts Workspaces and their tabs, Zen's structural departure from Firefox's traditional horizontal top tab bar. With the sidebar hidden, the browser reclaims that horizontal strip of screen space entirely for web content, which matters more on a smaller laptop display than on an ultrawide monitor with room to spare. Compact mode (toggled through Settings > Appearance in most builds, sometimes exposed as a toolbar icon) shrinks the padding around toolbar buttons, tab entries, and other interface chrome to fit noticeably more on screen without changing the underlying browser functionality at all — it's a purely visual density setting, independent of both Workspaces and split-view, so anyone who wants Zen's organizational features without its default roomier spacing can enable Compact mode on its own. This distinguishes Compact mode clearly from Zen Mode (the toolbar-and-chrome-hiding distraction-free mode mentioned in the FAQ above): Compact mode keeps everything visible but denser, while Zen Mode hides chrome outright for a cleaner reading or focus view. Because Workspaces are a genuinely young feature relative to Firefox's decades-old tab bar, expect Zen's own settings panel to be the most current source of truth for exactly which modifier keys are currently bound to Workspace switching on your specific platform and version — a detail worth checking directly in-app (through Zen's keyboard shortcuts settings page) if a binding documented here doesn't fire as expected, because Workspace hotkeys have been among the more frequently re-mapped parts of Zen as the feature matures release to release. Workspaces also carry a subtle but genuinely useful benefit around notification and context switching that's easy to overlook until you've used the feature for a while: because each Workspace's tab set is fully isolated, returning to a work Workspace after a break shows you exactly the tabs you left open for that specific context, without any personal-browsing tabs mixed in visually competing for attention. This matters more than it might sound for anyone who finds a long, undifferentiated tab bar mentally noisy — the simple act of switching Workspaces functions as a kind of context-reset, narrowing what's visually in front of you to just what's relevant to the task at hand. Worth knowing about Workspace persistence: closing and reopening Zen entirely generally restores your Workspaces and their tabs as they were, governed by the same session-restore settings that apply to ordinary tab persistence in Firefox — Workspaces aren't a separate, more fragile layer prone to being lost on restart, they're built on top of the same underlying session-storage mechanism Firefox has used reliably for years. A reasonable habit for anyone setting up Workspaces for the first time: start with just two — one for the single most demanding recurring context in your browsing life (work, a specific ongoing project, coursework) and one general-purpose Workspace for everything else — rather than trying to design a comprehensive multi-Workspace system upfront. Additional Workspaces are trivial to add later once you've actually felt where the natural boundaries in your own browsing habits fall, and starting with too many from day one tends to create more switching overhead than organizational benefit.