[Interest] Inconsistencies in MenuBar behaviour on Windows (QtQuick.Controls vs Qt.labs.platform)

[Richard Gustavsen]

On 4 Dec 2025, at 16:12, Nuno Santos via Interest <Interest at qt-project.org> wrote:

Hi,

I’m trying to uniformize the use of MenuBar since nowadays it is present in QtQuickControls and is not an experimental feature anymore.

However, on Windows it behaves very differently. When using the labs.platform version, the MenuBar really looks like a menu bar, the very same height and look and feel encountered on QtCreator itself.

However, if I use the QtQuickControls version, it gets higher in height, and the menu items have rounded corners.

Hi!

As documented here https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qml-qtquick-controls-menubar.html#native-menu-bars , a true native menu bar is only applied on macOS if using the MenuBar in Qt Quick Controls (as opposed to the version in labs, as you point out). The reason is that the labs implementation is old (based on win32 APIs), and doesn’t look very native anymore compared to e.g Outlook, Notepad, Paint etc. Newer Windows apps use slightly taller menu bars with more rounded buttons, which is why the MenuBar in Qt Quick Controls is styled to match this more contemporary look.

And the worst of all, it does not get into scene properly if the root element is not a window. In my case I have a root basic root element that is loaded by a QQuickView.

You cannot expect a MenuBar to be placed correctly inside the window unless assigned to ApplicationWindow.menuBar. Is this a regression, did it used to work before (not thinking about the labs MenuBar)? If so, please file a bug report so we can take a look at it.

Is this a known limitation of the MenuBar that was integrated into QtQuick.Controls?

The limitation is that we currently don’t offer a true native menu bar on other platforms than macOS, unless you use the version in labs.

It feels that I will need to keep use of the labs.platform version on windows and the other one for macOS and iOS? I really don’t like to have this kind of exceptions because this is the primary goal of Qt.

The labs version will remain available for the foreseeable future, so if it works well for your use case, you can safely continue using it.

BR,
Richard Moe Gustavsen
Principal Engineer
The Qt Company

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