Zulip 9.0, an alternative to Microsoft Teams, is available with a redesigned compose box

Those who have used Zulip know that it is a very reliable open source alternative to proprietary applications like Microsoft Teams and Slack, which do not aim to thrive on its users’ data.

Designed to be as intuitive as possible, it’s meant to be built to make conversations less chaotic and stressful, while still providing flexibility and extensibility for those who need it.

In a recent announcement, the developers have presented a new version that offers a wide range of improvements and upgrades. So let’s take a closer look.

🆕 Zulip 9.0: What’s new?

Being a major release, Zulip 9.0 came with over 5,300 new commits compared to 8.0, and saw over 120 people contribute to itwho improved the code and added new things to it.

As for the key points of this release, we start with the simplified user onboarding experience which now contains elements such as a new permanent removable banner to explain common operating situations on Zulip.

An example would be a small prompt to direct a user to use the back button on their browser or desktop application to return to a page when viewing a conversation, with a “Got it” to close it permanently.

Then there’s the more intrusive prompt to introduce users to their inbox when they first log in, with the developers having updated the introductory messages to better explain the different elements of Zulip.

They also caused some new integrations for Patreon, Grafana, GitHub and GitHub Sponsors.

Similarly, the Message composition has received many refinements which sees the introduction of a redesigned composition area, which improves the paste behavior from the clipboard. This allowed Zulip to preserve the formatting of elements such as links, bold, italics, bulleted lists, etc.

Draft behavior is also improved, with Zulip now automatically displaying the most recent draft of the selected conversation.

There is also a new “View reactions” to check how other people reacted to a message with emoji reactions.

THE The reading experience with Zulip 9.0 is a notable upgrade compared to previous versions. Fonts are now larger and line spacing is improved to make text easier to read.

Users can also choose to hide the left and right sidebars for a more focused reading experience. When these are hidden, the keyboard can be used to navigate around the app.

Fans of the old design can upgrade to the “compact mode” in the settings menu. The developers mentioned that they plan to add controls to change font size and line spacing with the next major release.

For administrators, User management has been improved by combining the User Settings panel to allow single management of current users, deactivated users, and invitations.

Channel administration undergoes changes Additionally, the channel creation process is now more intuitive, and the channel settings display additional details, including the date it was set up.

Other changes and improvements

There are a few other notable updates you should be aware of:

• A number of new keyboard shortcuts.
• Redesigned all menus for a clean look.
• THE “Streams” feature renamed to “Chains“.
• Various improvements to improve code efficiency.
• Added support for Ubuntu 24.04 and removed Ubuntu 20.04.
• Zulip server now displays previews of uploaded images in the message stream.

THE Mobile apps for Zulip are also set to get a revamp Later this year, for more information about this and the next major release of Zulip, you should check out the release blog.

Suggested Readings 📖

Ditch Slack with These Open Source Team Chat Tools

Here, we’ll take a look at the best open source alternatives to Slack that you can choose to communicate with your team at work.

📥 Download Zulip 9.0

To access Zulip 9.0, you can create a free organization account on the official website to host an instance on Zulip’s servers, sign up for one of the paid plans, or host it yourself.

If you opt for self-hosting, documentation is a must, with the required packages available on GitHub.

However, if you just want to see version 9.0 in action, you can visit the Zulip development community, which is maintaining the release. You can optionally create an account if you want a more comprehensive experience.

For existing usersThey can follow the official upgrade guide and upgrade notes to get their servers up and running with this release.

💬 Are you looking forward to implementing this on your existing Zulip server instance?

---

Learn more about It’s FOSS…