does Qt 5.4 apps can be debugged in pre win7

Question

I've been very surprised when I've discovered the implications of the choice of on Chromium instead of WebKit, regarding QtWebEngine.

Chromium requires VS2013, so I cannot develop and test on (for instance) my Vista Professional. VS2013 doesn't support XP, or Vista.

Also, installing Qt Creator 3.3.0, I don't get a runnable toolkit (was MinGW, 'til Qt 5.3).

The Help\\About Qt Creator... box says

Based on Qt 5.4.0 (MSVC 2010, 32 bit)

I don't get it... Seems my only option it's to stick to Qt 5.3. Or there is some trick I could try, before discarding Qt as a viable portability platform ?

Answer 1

Unfortunately The Chromium project has the limitation that you should only use MSVC 2013 Update 4. So there seems no way to work with Qt WebEngine on Windows XP or Vista either using VS or MinGW. If you don't want to use MSVC or if you want to use Windows XP or Vista, your only option is to use Qt WebKit which is still supported by Qt 5.4 and will continue to be provided in Qt 5.*.

You can read in Qt 5.4 known issues that :

QtWebEngine

Building on Windows currently requires Visual Studio 2013 or Visual Studio 2013 Express Edition This will most likely remain a requirement for Qt WebEngine. Changing it would require significant changes to the Chromium code base that are going against the direction Chromium is being developed.

Also you can use Qt 5.4.0 for Windows 32-bit (VS 2010) or (MinGW) on Windows XP or Windows Vista. After all you can compile Qt on the target OS with your desired compiler on your own. So there is no limitations on using previous versions of Windows as far as you do not want to use new features like Qt WebEngine.