What's New in Qt 5.6

Qt 5.6 is a long-term support (LTS) release.

New Modules

• Qt Quick Controls 2
  • Included as a technology preview.
  • Provides lightweight QML types for creating performant user interfaces for embedded and mobile devices.
• Qt Serial Bus
  • Included as a technology preview.
  • Provides a framework for accessing serial bus backends in general, and implementations for Controller Area Network (CAN) bus and Modbus.
• Qt Compositor(Qt Wayland)
  • Included as a technology preview.
  • Provides a framework to develop Wayland compositor.
• Qt WebEngine Core
  • Provides a public API shared by both Qt WebEngine and Qt WebEngine Widgets.

New Features in Qt 5.6

Qt 3D Module

• New buffer and attribute API.
• Support for OpenGL instanced rendering where supported.
• Support for OpenGL primitive restart.
• Support for clip planes, stencil operations, and many more OpenGL features.
• Support for easily generating buffer data from C++ and QML (using JavaScript typed arrays).
• qgltf tool to compile scenes into glTF.
• Support for loading glTF scenes via SceneLoader.
• Support for controlling multi-sampling with Scene3D.
• More standard materials: per-vertex colors and Gooch shading.
• New APIs for mouse input and collision detection.
• New Logic aspect to have QML/C++ code executed synchronously with the Qt 3D aspect engine. Useful for prototyping future Qt 3D features.

Qt Core Module

• Reduced memory usage of dynamic properties.
• Allow logging directly to syslog on Linux systems.
• Added QStorageInfo::blockSize().
• Added QVersionNumber class.
• Added key_iterator to QHash and QMap.
• Added const_iterator to QByteArray.
• Added reverse iterator support to all sequential containers.
• added QDir::listSeparator().
• Optimized performance in QString.

Qt Canvas3D Module

• Support for using Qt Quick items as textures.
• Support for rendering directly to Qt Quick scene background or foreground.

Qt GUI Module

• Improved cross-platform OpenGL ES 3.0 and 3.1 support to enable developing mobile/embedded applications utilizing GLES3 features.
• Improved cross-platform high-dpi support.
• Raster engine support for rendering internally with 16bits-per-color.
• QImageReader now exports gamma values and other meta data for some image formats.

Qt Multimedia Module

• New Playlist QML type.
• New audio role API for the media player (C++ and QML).
• Support for camera focus and video probe on WinRT.
• New functions in QML AudioEngine to support dynamic object creation.

Qt NFC Module

• Added support for Android.

Qt Network Module

• Added QHostAddress::isMulticast().
• Support HTTP redirection in QNetworkAccessManager.

Qt Platform Abstraction (QPA)

• Optional support for using FreeType on macOS.
• Added support for NVIDIA Jetson TK1 Pro boards running Vibrante Linux via a new eglfs backend utilizing DRM, EGLDevice, and EGLStream.
• Added support for Intel Atom-based NUCs.
• Added support for WEC2013.
• Windows 10 fully supported (classic and WinRT app)
• Windows Store apps are now composited inside a XAML layer, allowing better integration with the native UI layer.
• Use libinput, if available, as the default on eglfs and linuxfb.

Qt Positioning Module

• Added support for macOS.
• Added support for GPS receivers exposed as a serial port on Windows desktop (all versions).
• Removed libgeoclue dependency for the GeoClue backend.

Qt QML Module

• Support for writing JavaScript function names to Linux's perf output.
• Reduced overall memory consumption.

Qt Testlib Module

• More stable input event handling.

Qt WebView Module

• Added support for WinRT.

Qt WebEngine Module

• Based on Chromium 45.
• Support for pepper plugins including Flash.
• Support for unbundling and linking with system libraries on Linux.
• Support for following global Qt proxy settings.
• More WebActions from QtWebKit and WebAction API in QML.
• New QtWebEngineCore module for shared low-level API.
• New core API for custom URL schemes.
• New core API for intercepting and blocking network requests.
• New core API for tracking or blocking cookies.

Qt Widgets Module

• Allow programmatic resizing of dock widgets.
• Allow dropping dock widgets into floating docks.
• Allow the user to re-arrange tabbed docks.
• Allow horizontal scrolling using a mouse wheel in QListView.
• Support QOpenGLWidget and QQuickWidget on WinRT.

Removed Functionality

• Qt WebKit
• Qt Declarative (Qt Quick 1)

Deprecated Functionality

• Enginio
• Qt Script

These modules are still included in Qt 5.6, but are considered for removal in future releases.

List of API Changes

The pages below contain a list of API changes in Qt 5.6:

• New Classes and Functions in Qt 5.6
• Obsolete Classes

Additions to Other Qt 5 Releases

• What's New in Qt 5.5
• What's New in Qt 5.4
• What's New in Qt 5.3
• What's New in Qt 5.2
• What's New in Qt 5.1
• What's New in Qt 5.0