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Comment by gitgud | Hacker News Reader

The Flutter web port is ridiculous. It circumvents the entire point of a Web page as it's literally just a canvas on the Web page.

You lose all advantages that HTML and CSS gives you, links, styling, accessibility, text selection! ... It's basically a flash website... Which admittedly is okay for some applications

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You might be misinformed; according to https://medium.com/flutter/hummingbird-building-flutter-for-... Flutter for Web uses HTML & CSS where it can, and falls back to Canvas where it can't.

Flutter for Web is still on Beta, so lets see where it lands. Today, it seems to implement some PWA practices and lazyloading to try and get some performance.

Well that article is from 2018 and kind of overemphasises the HTML and CSS where it can.

Checkout the official [1] Flutter web demos. Even the simplest [2] example renders basically every part of the UI (including text!!) within canvas elements, which is a bit crazy to me... but yes it's still Beta, so we'll see what they can improve

[1] https://flutter.github.io/samples/#?platform=web

[2] https://flutter.github.io/samples/web/animations/#/

Wow that's pretty insane. I can't select any text on any of those examples, I can't open anything in a new tab, and I can't save any images.

For some web app, that's a feature

I wonder how SEO is handled for web applications built with Flutter since its mostly canvas.

They also create a thousand webcomponent wrappers to display this.

I got a big grey screen on the first three I clicked. Not sure if this is ready for prime time...

Isn't this consistent with Flutter's approach in general, though? On iOS, Android, etc., it uses its own widget toolkit and does its own rendering, it's not a wrapper over the native toolkits and renderers.

It's Flash all over again, with a fresh coat of paint.

I look forward to the day when the folks that shout the benefits of Electron desktop development start screaming over Flutter ruining the web because “it ignores everything that’s good in the browser!”

Not sure what browser you're using. But here it's actually using webcomponents and CSS houdini to render all demos I tried. Nowhere did I see any canvas usage.

I only did some reading about Flutter for web and I kept thinking "Wait ... is this the web anymore then?"

Admittedly I need to go back and check but it was confusing and worrisome.

Is it WebGL?

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