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Flutter on the web is absolutely insane. For those who don't know, it basically strips away everything and wraps it in a big terrifyingly complex mess of code a

Flutter on the web is absolutely insane. For those who don't know, it basically strips away everything and wraps it in a big terrifyingly complex mess of code and renders everything in a canvas. Flutter advocates like to claim that that's "only a fallback" for when things get complex but as far as I can tell the vast majority of things (including the simplest examples from Flutter itself) force the entire thing into canvas: it's basically Flash 2.0, but worse. I seriously hope that Flutter fades. It's very dangerous in many ways. Even ignoring the huge downsides of basically having a new Flash, consider this: the massive Flutter layer is, surprise surprise, yet another Google project that is magically _significantly_ slower in Firefox. I don't mean a small difference here, I mean that on a brand new fancy flagship I tested on, Flutter in Chrome is buttery smooth and Flutter in Firefox is a miserable, laggy experience. If it gets popular, this will become yet another reason pushing people off Firefox and cementing Google's dominance of the web. Flutter is a very, very dangerous thing.

snodnipper 6y ago
Adobe Flex was my most productive client development experience over the past 20 years. I transitioned to Android _but_ there were many hideous things with that (e.g. ghastly emulator, legacy Java support etc.). My personal hope is that Flutter gains traction and the web can move beyond current web/native technology. Postscript / PDFs aren't suitable for game experiences...and to my mind web standards have been shoehorned into supporting web apps, where there is a mismatch with native technologies. I'd like to think that Flutter can help bridge that gap. This is not to say that accessibility etc. should be ignored...nor better support in Firefox...but even Brendan Eich is using Blink/V8 with Brave. Anyhow, thoughts of one.
- nojvek 6y ago
  Ahhhh Adobe Flex with MXML and ActionScript3. Before Typescript and React with JSX got popular that was the cool kids club. RIAs yo! Rich internet applications. I loved what Flex brought to the table. Too bad Adobe didn’t open source flash and let it die.
  - KuhlMensch 6y ago
    It lives on in web APIs
- dilap 6y ago
  As hated as flash was, there was a whole creative ecosystem of really unique games / art pieces that died off with it. A shame.
K0nserv 6y ago
This is an insane approach on all platforms and it's depressing that Flutter is gaining mind share. Throwing away the whole platform and rendering everything from scratch with OpenGL/Vulkan etc is just flabbergasting. Having worked with/on React Native for ~3 years I am definitely not a fan but at least React Native enables using native components directly even if this happens too rarely.
biggestdecision 6y ago
Goodbye accessibility.
deleted 6y ago
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snodnipper 6y ago

Adobe Flex was my most productive client development experience over the past 20 years. I transitioned to Android _but_ there were many hideous things with that (e.g. ghastly emulator, legacy Java support etc.). My personal hope is that Flutter gains traction and the web can move beyond current web/native technology. Postscript / PDFs aren't suitable for game experiences...and to my mind web standards have been shoehorned into supporting web apps, where there is a mismatch with native technologies. I'd like to think that Flutter can help bridge that gap. This is not to say that accessibility etc. should be ignored...nor better support in Firefox...but even Brendan Eich is using Blink/V8 with Brave. Anyhow, thoughts of one.

nojvek 6y ago
Ahhhh Adobe Flex with MXML and ActionScript3. Before Typescript and React with JSX got popular that was the cool kids club. RIAs yo! Rich internet applications. I loved what Flex brought to the table. Too bad Adobe didn’t open source flash and let it die.
- KuhlMensch 6y ago
  It lives on in web APIs
dilap 6y ago
As hated as flash was, there was a whole creative ecosystem of really unique games / art pieces that died off with it. A shame.

K0nserv 6y ago

This is an insane approach on all platforms and it's depressing that Flutter is gaining mind share. Throwing away the whole platform and rendering everything from scratch with OpenGL/Vulkan etc is just flabbergasting. Having worked with/on React Native for ~3 years I am definitely not a fan but at least React Native enables using native components directly even if this happens too rarely.

biggestdecision 6y ago

Goodbye accessibility.

deleted 6y ago

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