Qt WebEngine Platform Notes

Building Qt WebEngine from Source

Static builds are not supported.

The requirements for building Qt 5 modules from source are listed separately for each supported platform:

• Qt for Windows - Requirements
• Qt for X11 Requirements
• Qt for macOS - Requirements

In addition, the following tools are required for building the Qt WebEngine module:

• All Platforms
• Windows
• Linux
• macOS

The tests for skipping the Qt WebEngine build are located in the qtwebengine repository, in the tools\qmake\mkspecs subdirectory. They can be found by searching for skipBuild.

All Platforms

On all platforms, the following tools are required:

• Python 2.7 or later
• Bison, Flex
• GPerf

Windows

On Windows, Visual Studio 2013 or Visual Studio 2015 is required.

Linux

On Linux, Clang or GCC version 4.7 or later is required. Supported configurations are linux-g++ and linux-clang.

Qt WebEngine requires pkg-config to detect most of its dependencies. The following pkg-config files are required:

• dbus-1
• fontconfig

If Qt was configured for xcb, the following pkg-config files are also required:

• libdrm
• xcomposite
• xcursor
• xi
• xrandr
• xscrnsaver
• xtst

Further, development packages for khr and libcap need to be installed.

macOS

On macOS, the following are required:

• macOS 10.9 or later
• Xcode 6.1 or later
• macOS 10.10 SDK or later

Note: Qt WebEngine cannot be built for the 32-bit mode of macOS (using the macx-clang-32 mkspec).

Mac App Store Compatibility

By default, Qt WebEngine uses private OS X API, which might cause an application to be rejected when submitted to the Mac App Store. To configure Qt WebEngine not to use these API calls, Qt WebEngine has to be recompiled:

  qmake WEBENGINE_CONFIG+=use_appstore_compliant_code

However, this will cause some behavioral changes, such as:

• The OS X Kill Ring functionality will no longer work (emacs-like copy pasting).
• Certain Chromium sandboxing cleanup is not done.
• Text areas will be painted with a different style.
• Text fields might be painted with a different style on Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8).

Default QSurfaceFormat OpenGL Profile Support

If a new default QSurfaceFormat with a modified OpenGL profile has to be set, it should be set before the application instance is declared, to make sure that all created OpenGL contexts use the same OpenGL profile.

On macOS, if the default QSurfaceFormat is set after the application instance, the application will exit with qFatal(), and print a message that the default QSurfaceFormat should be set before the application instance.