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[Flutter Eng. Dir. here] I really appreciate the feedback. We clearly have more work to do on the Web side of Flutter. Unlike the Mobile side which has shipp

[Flutter Eng. Dir. here] I really appreciate the feedback. We clearly have more work to do on the Web side of Flutter. Unlike the Mobile side which has shipped 100,000s of apps, the Web side may be up to like 1000. :) So many more issues to address as we work closely with more users to get their apps into production. If you'd like to track progress on any of these, I'd encourage you (or anyone else reading) to please file issues at flutter.dev/support. We read (and try to address) each and every one which comes in via Github.

rektide 6y ago
The CanvasKit renderer[1] is highly concerning to the general health of the web. It's nice that it's easy for developers, but it remove all the power of the web. To an end user, their accessibiliy tools, & user extensions, the page might as well be VNC'ed in to some system. Everything is opaque. There's no HTML elements. I can not state strongly enough how immoral & unethical this path is. Bending the web to the developers will & breaking all the contracts of what a web page is a grevious act, is enormously harmful. This is one of the worst possible things that could happen to the web. Please for god sake don't do this to us. Don't injure the web like this. This will be raised again and again and again until the ends of time as an incredible black mark on the name of Flutter. Edit: constructive feedback welcome. Whether it's me or others, folks pointing out this peril often find themselves hit by downvotes as I do now. This seems like an existential challenge for the web, to keep humans able to be in the loop when browsing the internet. We would all love if you would defend or explain or have something to offer in your critiques about this crisis. [1] https://flutter.dev/docs/development/tools/web-renderers https://flutter.dev/docs/development/tools/web-renderers
- jitbit 6y ago
  Yes, my knee jerk reaction was just like yours. But... think of this as new Adobe Flash. Or a new MS Silverlight. Some people use it, mostly for privately hosted local apps. Most people won't. PS. And then Google will probably kill it anyway
jessaustin 6y ago
[Flutter ... here] Currently I'm counting four or maybe five different HN users in this thread indicating this affiliation. I appreciate this open look into the organization. We're probably getting a more honest idea about what really goes into the sausage. Still, your PM might be less happy about this thread...
- csells 6y ago
  Actually, PMs love open, honest feedback. Keep it coming! Chris Sells PM, Flutter
  - masterofmisc 6y ago
    Recognize the name! Interesting to hear you moved from Microsoft to Google.
danShumway 6y ago
I appreciate that building something that works even this well targeting Canvas must have been a metric ton of work, and I'm impressed. But that's kind of the issue -- it cannot possibly be more work to maintain a separate rendering/compilation pipeline for browsers than it is to rebuild the entirety of Chrome's DOM engine in WebGL for CanvasKit. I just don't see how Flutter is going to keep pace with "native" web apps when the team is constantly playing catch up every time a new medium, input method, or browser feature comes up. Handling scroll is hard enough, is this going to handle WebVR? Can I control this web app with a voice assistant? Sorry if this is something of a dismissive answer, but I'm not sure what the right way is to file an issue that boils down to, "it seems like you picked literally the hardest possible way to build a web GUI toolkit, and I'm very impressed that you have anything that's usable at all, but I also don't understand why you did this." I don't know, I don't want to be overly negative here, but I don't have any confidence at all about the overall strategy that Flutter is pursuing. In order to get accessibility to work, you're basically going to end up building a DOM representation of these apps anyway. It's just now you have to build a DOM representation and you have to completely reimplement the rendering stack and capture all of my events? How are you going to make something like that performant across every browser? I want to echo a few other comments I've seen here that this result isn't really surprising to me. I guessed before I clicked on the demos that they probably wouldn't handle scroll events well, because I know how you're building Flutter for the web, and I have never seen any GUI frameworks targeting pure Canvas on the web that don't have basic errors like this. If Flutter ever managed to be the exception, that would be very surprising to me. I don't know what Flutter's internal process looks like, I'm not going to tell you you're building something wrong. I only know what the end result looks like, and I know that end result is not going to radically improve any time soon. It's not my place to tell any team what to do, and nobody is obligated to care what I think, but... I don't know, the demos online do not leave me feeling confident about Flutter's future. I don't think the experience as it exists today is the result of a bunch of isolated issues/bugs that can be fixed one at a time.
- oscargrouch 6y ago
  Its nice to have absolute control of the rendering going over canvas if you are a flutter platform developer and i think even playing the catch-up game they should get there eventually. But i don't think this is the real issue here.. Flutter is more of a Flash and GWT lineage, and that's fine if that's what you are looking for. But i bet on the Web every time, its the most popular UI (and now much more) platform ever. So while some will go through the Flutter and React way of doing things, most will just stick with the web. The web is the most sophisticated platform ever built. It gives you a lot of power and freedom, so i don't understand why some prefer to get stuck into a cubicle when you have so much space? Its nice to have frameworks to make things easy and developers more productive, but the ones that do this without alienating the developer from the bigger, broad and sophisticated framework are just better. Just let them be the new Flash, now at least open and over the web, and look for other approaches if you want to maintain real control and freedom, instead of delegating to the platform developers.
heavyset_go 6y ago
I don't understand how breaking accessibility with Flutter wouldn't mean that companies that use it on the web are violating the ADA.
- mdoms 6y ago
  I don't know what that is but I assume it's some kind of American nonsense I don't care at all about.
  - vanadium 6y ago
    Multiple countries around the world have legal standards around accessibility. Then you have the ethical, DE&I, and business reasons to enable disabled users equal access to the web platform and apps through screen readers and other assistive technologies, i.e., accessibility. It’s certainly not a uniquely American concern.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    I assume that you just haven't run into this specific term before, but if that's not the case then comments like these are why the web community overall should oppose web technologies that leave accessibility decisions solely up to end developers or that don't make accessible options the default. The web works as well as it does because (in general) it's accessible by default. There are lots of open problems on the web regarding accessibility, but we should be moving towards being more accessible by default, not less -- because if we want a universally accessible app platform, developers and corporations can not be trusted to make these decisions on their own, and laws will only affect specific industries and countries. That's part of why Flutter devs talking about dev decisions that can increase accessibility ring kind of hollow to me. Accessibility has to be something that's pushed at a technological and cultural level if we want the web to be a platform that leads the way forward on these issues.
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    Accessibility is American nonsense?
miohtama 6y ago
On mobile, you can hook to low level native input events. On a web browser, <input> is all you have and because of the abstraction you cannot build it from the scratch using lower events. Think iPhone text selection. Flutter on web may cater a specific category of graphical intensive apps, but not all apps because <canvas>. It will fall to the same uncanny valley where Java applets where back in 00s.
radiKal07 6y ago
My question is, if there is "more work to do on the Web", why is Flutter Web considered stable?

rektide 6y ago

The CanvasKit renderer[1] is highly concerning to the general health of the web. It's nice that it's easy for developers, but it remove all the power of the web. To an end user, their accessibiliy tools, & user extensions, the page might as well be VNC'ed in to some system. Everything is opaque. There's no HTML elements. I can not state strongly enough how immoral & unethical this path is. Bending the web to the developers will & breaking all the contracts of what a web page is a grevious act, is enormously harmful. This is one of the worst possible things that could happen to the web. Please for god sake don't do this to us. Don't injure the web like this. This will be raised again and again and again until the ends of time as an incredible black mark on the name of Flutter. Edit: constructive feedback welcome. Whether it's me or others, folks pointing out this peril often find themselves hit by downvotes as I do now. This seems like an existential challenge for the web, to keep humans able to be in the loop when browsing the internet. We would all love if you would defend or explain or have something to offer in your critiques about this crisis. [1] https://flutter.dev/docs/development/tools/web-renderers https://flutter.dev/docs/development/tools/web-renderers

jitbit 6y ago
Yes, my knee jerk reaction was just like yours. But... think of this as new Adobe Flash. Or a new MS Silverlight. Some people use it, mostly for privately hosted local apps. Most people won't. PS. And then Google will probably kill it anyway

jessaustin 6y ago

[Flutter ... here] Currently I'm counting four or maybe five different HN users in this thread indicating this affiliation. I appreciate this open look into the organization. We're probably getting a more honest idea about what really goes into the sausage. Still, your PM might be less happy about this thread...

csells 6y ago
Actually, PMs love open, honest feedback. Keep it coming! Chris Sells PM, Flutter
- masterofmisc 6y ago
  Recognize the name! Interesting to hear you moved from Microsoft to Google.

danShumway 6y ago

I appreciate that building something that works even this well targeting Canvas must have been a metric ton of work, and I'm impressed. But that's kind of the issue -- it cannot possibly be more work to maintain a separate rendering/compilation pipeline for browsers than it is to rebuild the entirety of Chrome's DOM engine in WebGL for CanvasKit. I just don't see how Flutter is going to keep pace with "native" web apps when the team is constantly playing catch up every time a new medium, input method, or browser feature comes up. Handling scroll is hard enough, is this going to handle WebVR? Can I control this web app with a voice assistant? Sorry if this is something of a dismissive answer, but I'm not sure what the right way is to file an issue that boils down to, "it seems like you picked literally the hardest possible way to build a web GUI toolkit, and I'm very impressed that you have anything that's usable at all, but I also don't understand why you did this." I don't know, I don't want to be overly negative here, but I don't have any confidence at all about the overall strategy that Flutter is pursuing. In order to get accessibility to work, you're basically going to end up building a DOM representation of these apps anyway. It's just now you have to build a DOM representation and you have to completely reimplement the rendering stack and capture all of my events? How are you going to make something like that performant across every browser? I want to echo a few other comments I've seen here that this result isn't really surprising to me. I guessed before I clicked on the demos that they probably wouldn't handle scroll events well, because I know how you're building Flutter for the web, and I have never seen any GUI frameworks targeting pure Canvas on the web that don't have basic errors like this. If Flutter ever managed to be the exception, that would be very surprising to me. I don't know what Flutter's internal process looks like, I'm not going to tell you you're building something wrong. I only know what the end result looks like, and I know that end result is not going to radically improve any time soon. It's not my place to tell any team what to do, and nobody is obligated to care what I think, but... I don't know, the demos online do not leave me feeling confident about Flutter's future. I don't think the experience as it exists today is the result of a bunch of isolated issues/bugs that can be fixed one at a time.

oscargrouch 6y ago
Its nice to have absolute control of the rendering going over canvas if you are a flutter platform developer and i think even playing the catch-up game they should get there eventually. But i don't think this is the real issue here.. Flutter is more of a Flash and GWT lineage, and that's fine if that's what you are looking for. But i bet on the Web every time, its the most popular UI (and now much more) platform ever. So while some will go through the Flutter and React way of doing things, most will just stick with the web. The web is the most sophisticated platform ever built. It gives you a lot of power and freedom, so i don't understand why some prefer to get stuck into a cubicle when you have so much space? Its nice to have frameworks to make things easy and developers more productive, but the ones that do this without alienating the developer from the bigger, broad and sophisticated framework are just better. Just let them be the new Flash, now at least open and over the web, and look for other approaches if you want to maintain real control and freedom, instead of delegating to the platform developers.

heavyset_go 6y ago

I don't understand how breaking accessibility with Flutter wouldn't mean that companies that use it on the web are violating the ADA.

mdoms 6y ago
I don't know what that is but I assume it's some kind of American nonsense I don't care at all about.
- vanadium 6y ago
  Multiple countries around the world have legal standards around accessibility. Then you have the ethical, DE&I, and business reasons to enable disabled users equal access to the web platform and apps through screen readers and other assistive technologies, i.e., accessibility. It’s certainly not a uniquely American concern.
- danShumway 6y ago
  I assume that you just haven't run into this specific term before, but if that's not the case then comments like these are why the web community overall should oppose web technologies that leave accessibility decisions solely up to end developers or that don't make accessible options the default. The web works as well as it does because (in general) it's accessible by default. There are lots of open problems on the web regarding accessibility, but we should be moving towards being more accessible by default, not less -- because if we want a universally accessible app platform, developers and corporations can not be trusted to make these decisions on their own, and laws will only affect specific industries and countries. That's part of why Flutter devs talking about dev decisions that can increase accessibility ring kind of hollow to me. Accessibility has to be something that's pushed at a technological and cultural level if we want the web to be a platform that leads the way forward on these issues.
- EvilEy3 6y ago
  Accessibility is American nonsense?

miohtama 6y ago

On mobile, you can hook to low level native input events. On a web browser, <input> is all you have and because of the abstraction you cannot build it from the scratch using lower events. Think iPhone text selection. Flutter on web may cater a specific category of graphical intensive apps, but not all apps because <canvas>. It will fall to the same uncanny valley where Java applets where back in 00s.

radiKal07 6y ago

My question is, if there is "more work to do on the Web", why is Flutter Web considered stable?