Thanks for planning on leaving a dense option in. I much prefer UIs with less whitespace and am saddened by the current trends in this area. I really like Zulip and its UI, thank you and everyone else for creating it!
The UI was what kept us from Zulip last time we evaluated chat at my employer. When maximizing the window not even half of it was covered by the actual chat but by meaningless white space on both sides. We could not figure out how to change this either. Is this addressed with the new release?
* There's active work on replacing the top-navbar/search area with something nice and clean that displays the stream description, number of subscribers, and other details.
* Our current visual density is really good for power users, but . zooming to 110% makes some people a lot happier and makes Zulip look more modern. We're working on changing the default visual density to look more like that, while leaving the current styling as an option for power users.
* You should try the night theme (in "display settings") -- a lot of folks who are picky about design prefer that one.