I haven’t played around with it yet, but it looks neat
This small but mighty update includes some exciting new features and improvements to Zen, such as passkey support for MacOS, and a media player controller that’s fully integrated with Picture-in-Picture mode.
The link from the button: https://zen-browser.app/release-notes/#1.10.1b
You can disable the state-less empty tab if you set
zen.urlbar.replace-newtab
on disabled in about:configFound in release notes 1.8b:
Thanks for this, but that setting was already disabled, unfortunately. This feels more like a bug than a deliberate result of a chosen setting.