Flutter for Web feels like such a wild step backwards in terms of functionality that I'm not sure the benefits it brings are worth it. I just tried a few samples, and basic interactions like selecting text, saving images, and opening links in new tabs don't work. This is the result of rendering everything to a element. I'm much more interested in a React Native style approach, which seems to provide a consistent set of components that work the same on mobile, desktop, and web.

Yeah, I haven’t been following Flutter, but I’m surprised their approach to the web is just shipping their entire custom layout/drawing code in WebAssembly and drawing everything with canvas. I would have expected them to actually port their native UI components (buttons, links, text, etc.) to their corresponding native components on the web, and maybe ship a custom layout engine if CSS layouts aren’t flexible enough.

Hixie

We actually did try that as our first approach, but it really didn't give you the flexibility that Flutter developers expect.

As the erstwhile editor of the HTML standard for ~10 years and the now TL of Flutter I must admit that it's weird to be creating a web framework that completely ignores all the HTML stuff I worked on before. :-)

That said, Flutter is different from Flash in some important ways. Flash used the NPAPI to "break out" of the web and was basically "native" code you could escape to, whereas Flutter really is using web APIs, like Wasm, ARIA, WebGL, JS, WebComponents, and so on, to create true web apps that just happen to not use much of the control set that HTML exposes.

I suspect that even outside of Flutter, the web in general is going to move towards this kind of framework in the coming years. It just gives you so much more control. It's basically how every other platform works -- pick your language, compile to machine code, don't need to be limited to what HTML and CSS (etc) enable.

BystanderX

So this is already a pretty toasty section of comments so let me put this to you. If you've already answered this elsewhere, please let me know.

I would be surprised if someone heavily involved in the Web's development process for a long time didn't have some really sore spots about it.

That aside:

What do you think of the loss of opportunities for learning and customization that moving to an opaque system running "in" the web (flutter) implies?

How did you get into the Web? Was being able to easily inspect and change what was happening in apps you didn't have intentional source access for (web pages/apps) not key to that?

Have you gotten value from the ability to quickly use others' extensions of useragent behavior that seem highly unlikely to work with this approach? Or will they be able to?

Fairly loaded questions I guess, but realistic ones too, not just philosophical.

munificent

> Was being able to easily inspect and change what was happening in apps you didn't have intentional source access for (web pages/apps) not key to that?

I got into web design/programming in the 90s, and the answer is basically no. Sure you could poke around a bit, but I never found it to be a revelation. I still had to buy books, read blogs, and do a ton of trial and error. Also, it was a never-ending game of trying to testing to see what each new browser release added or broke.

We are in infinitely better position today thanks to open source. The "View Source" of today is GitHub. Want to write a high-performance dynamically typed language VM? Here: https://github.com/v8/v8 Build an operating system? OK: https://github.com/torvalds/linux Build a database? Here you go: https://github.com/postgres/postgres