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# Epiphany Browser in GNOME 40 will Feature a New Tab bar
- URL: https://itsfoss.com/news/gnome-web-new-tab/
- Published: 2021-03-15T15:43:04.000Z
- Updated: 2021-03-15T15:43:08.000Z
- Author: Sourav Rudra
- Tags: Development Updates, News, #Import 2025-11-08 21:15

Epiphany Browser or known more popularly as GNOME Web, the default browser of the [GNOME](https://www.gnome.org/?ref=itsfoss.com) desktop environment is getting a major overhaul to one of it’s most used section, the tab bar.

It was pretty simple, but now it is shaping up as a modern experience to compete with the likes of other popular browsers available for Linux.

The new tab bar is a complete rewrite and now features two distinct widgets called `HdyTabView` and `HdyTabBar` that can be now used to implement the updated tab and will replace the existing widget called `GtkNotebook`.

Ignore the technical jargon, overall, the old widget had many usability issues and was overall very tacky and outdated. So, the new widgets offer a host of usability improvements and have a very modern feel to it.

## What Can We Expect?

Let’s go through some of the major changes that are set to come with Epiphany in GNOME 40.

- Tabs will now feature website icons (favicons), the title of the website, a tooltip, close button, a context menu that can show options like open in new window, open in incognito, pin tab, etc. and a loading spinner element that will show the loading progress of a website.
- A new feature of pinning tabs will be introduced, this will ensure that a user can pin important tabs so that they don’t close them accidentally.

![](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/03/tabs-unread-1.png)

- A new indicator icon that will be shown on every tab that is playing an audio or video with an option to mute a tab from there. Pinned tabs will also feature this, instead of the website icon an indicator will be shown so that a user can easily locate the pinned tab.

![](https://itsfoss.com/content/images/wordpress/2021/03/tabs-indicators-1.png)

- Tabs can now be dragged and dropped to be reordered and can be moved between windows and tab views.
- The new tab bar also supports touchscreen gestures such as, dragging a tab bar to scroll through multiple tabs, long pressing and dragging a tab to reorder it and an even longer press on a tab to open the context menu.
- New animations have been added to tab opening, closing, reordering, drag-drop and showing/hiding from the tab bar.

For more information on the changes, you can read the [blog post on GNOME’s official website.](https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2021/03/13/reinventing-tabs/?ref=itsfoss.com)

## Wrapping Up

These improvements are set to be featured in GNOME 40 and future plans are also there for extending these improvements to the mobile version of Epiphany.

*What do you think of these changes? Excited to try it out in GNOME 40?*