Before we get to TAB changes, let's go over Minecraft 26.2 changes that affect TAB. We have some excellent news and some slightly bad news.

• The bug in belowname objective introduced in 26.1 causing all named entities to have belowname visible was fixed. Not only that, but now it no longer appears on player entities that do not have a score set. This means 2 things. First, NPCs will no longer have any belowname forced when the feature is enabled. Second, it is now possible to hide belowname on individual players. See TAB changes below to see how this is implemented.
• Now it's time for bad news. We are all hoping Mojang will one day allow RGB names in the nametag. However, they seem to have taken the opposite path - it no longer supports magic codes, only the 16 legacy colors codes now.

TAB changes:

• Added support for Bukkit 26.2 and removed support for 1.9.x, 1.10.x, 1.11.x, 1.13.x, 1.14.x and 1.15.x. While they may sound like a lot, this change only affects 4 out of 30000 servers that updated TAB at least once this year.
• Updated Fabric and NeoForge to 26.2. 26.1.x is no longer supported.
• Performance improvements
• Resolved console warnings on Java 26+
• Belowname has received a new functionality in accordance with the new 26.2 functionality. When fancy-value evaluates to an empty string, the entire line will be hidden for 26.2+ viewers. If you want to take advantage of this and support both <26.2 and 26.2+ and don't want to show empty value to <26.2 players (because you want to hide it for 26.2+), but the original value instead, this is a bit more complicated. See belowname wiki page for a new example how to do this.
• Colors from placeholders returned by placeholder-api on Fabric are now properly displayed and no longer thrown away
• Improved dump command output
• Fixed PlaceholderAPI placeholders sometimes breaking on /btab reload with latest TAB-Bridge
• Added <head_texture:TEXTURE> tag resolver to MiniMessage parser for displaying skin by texture when having MiniMessage support enabled.
• Added support for "*" wildcard and regex into per world playerlist world groups just like global playerlist supports it.
• Scoreboard and bossbar custom toggle commands now pass all arguments to the main command
• Implemented disable-condition forwarding to proxy-support
• Fixed last color detection in tagprefix not noticing magic codes after using &r. Now with 26.2 no longer supporting those it probably doesn't matter though.

One more technical change at the end. Since version 6.0.2, it is no longer possible to support everything in one jar due to a bug in Paper 1.20.5 - 1.21.4 that crashes when a jar contains classes compiled with Java 24+, which was needed by modded platform. Now, it is also required by Paper 26.2. This means that splitting jars into "Vanilla" and "Modded" is not possible anymore. As such, there was a change and now there is the main jar with all classes (without any name suffix) and another jar called "Paper 1.20.5 - 1.21.4". Use the correct one. This pattern will follow indefinitely for all future updates.