A dystopia. You can't control-F in the page. Can't copy and paste a word you don't know into a translator or dictionary. Can't share text unofficially - like copy a sentence into a email, etc.

So basically they are recreating the problems from Flash in 2021, but now using web standards ;-) ?

Here's me almost hoping that ADA lawyers will have many field days with this tech. Edit: since this time there is no good excuse for it.

One step up, two step down.

Progress

"Poor boy shuffle"

Also, you know, accessibility. This could be a real serious problem for people with disabilities.

This is 100% the reason why I decided not to use Flutter back when I was shopping.

It probably would have reduced my developer effort considerably compared to basically every other option that made it to my short list, but I can't in good conscience build something that isn't accessible.

Flutter claims to be fully accessible: https://flutter.dev/docs/development/accessibility-and-local...

Did you actually try it?

Thank you for saying "claims to". Copy pasting a response I made elsewhere:

This is making a mockery of accessibility.

It's the equivalent of having a company that actively discriminates against everyone not passing a internally developed test to check whether you are a "neurotypical" and then respond to criticism by pointing at the wheelchair ramp you installed on one of your entrances.

If I can't copy paste words from your websites to put them into a translator, if I can only use your website when I use one of the two corporate-affiliate-selected screen readers (not even platform-agnostic ones), when I can't look at your website from anything that does not have 4+ cores and a 4G or better connection...saying accessiblity is a "first class citizen" or even citizen at all is laughable at best.

I said "claims to" because I don't know how I can verify if it is. The other person responding to me correctly mention how they suggest tools to scan for accessibility issues on iOS and Android, but they don't say how to do that on the web... have you managed to somehow figure out what is not currently working, exactly?

Regarding performance: Chrome uses Skia to render the DOM, why do you think rendering Flutter, also based on Skia, should be so much worse?

The thing is, when you're shopping for GUI toolkits, "try it and find out" isn't a great decisionmaking rubric. Partially because there are a zillion of them and you simply can't try them all, and partially because learning one is expensive and time-consuming, so, unless you genuinely enjoy that kind of thing, you kind of want to pick one in one shot.

Meaning that, in a slate of options where one of them can definitely do something you need, and another one where the official story seems to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and the examples you've seen seem to indicate that it's at least something you need to go out of your way to accomplish, there really isn't any injustice in deciding to expend no further mental energy on the latter.

That said, if you want spend your own time digging in and finding out, be my guest.

Flutter is not competing with general GUI toolkits, it's competing with fully crossplatform toolkits, of which there's only a couple of real contenders for real-world apps: React Native and maybe Sciter.

Nothing else is production-ready and can run on the web, iOS, Android and desktop OSs (Linux, Windows, MacOS).

It's not competing with pure web frameworks. For this reason, yes, I think that if you're going to criticize it, you absolutely need to know what you're talking about... if Flutter claims it can handle accessibility, it's on you to prove it can't if you make this argument so eloquently on the Internet without actually knowing it.

BTW if you know of any other good UI Toolkits that really can run anywhere like Flutter, using the same code base, please let me know.

No, I just looked at the documentation and saw that it isn't supported on all the platforms I'd be targeting.

For example, that page you link is specific to iOS and Android targets. Nary a mention of what to do when you're targeting the Web. But it's also, at least as of when I did my comparison, explicitly not supported on at least some desktop targets.

Accessibility is a first class citizen in flutter. https://flutter.dev/docs/development/accessibility-and-local...

This is making a mockery of accessibility.

It's the equivalent of having a company that actively discriminates against everyone not passing a internally developed test to check whether you are a "neurotypical" and then respond to criticism by pointing at the wheelchair ramp you installed on one of your entrances.

If I can't copy paste words from your websites to put them into a translator, if I can only use your website when I use one of the two corporate-affiliate-selected screen readers (not even platform-agnostic ones), when I can't look at your website from anything that does not have 4+ cores and a 4G or better connection...saying accessiblity is a "first class citizen" or even citizen at all is laughable at best.

You're talking about very different issues of accessibility, one of which is the financial accessibility of client technology and reliable web connection.

That is attacked through very different means. For example, FB being free and ad funded addresses that issue; but this is a business model and not a technological standard. Society subsidizing technology is another possibility. But these very serious issues of access and the solutions to negotiate with them are very different from purely technical solutions to access.

HyperText Markup Language is accessible, doesn't require a powerful computer, and can be copy-pasted into a translator.

If your website is unreadable in view-source:, it's probably inaccessible in some way. It's not hard to make an accessible website. If it's hard to make that accessible website look the way you want? Tough luck; hire a competent web designer, or scale back your artistic vision, because you sure ain't sacrificing the ability for people to actually use your website for some pretty colours, are you now?

That's only for iOS and Android apps. (Desktop?) screen readers do not work at all on gallery.flutter.dev, because they can't detect text in a canvas.

I wish that page mentioned how accessibility works for Flutter websites. Seems to only mention Android and iOS.

Due to Section 508, this sounds like it would make Google Docs unsuitable for government work.

I'm hoping for a revamped EU accessibility act https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202 that also covers document and office applications, and with GDPR sized fines.

We have to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater here, though. Obviously accessibility is an important issue for both commercial and ethical reasons, but if you're talking about writing laws and severe penalties for breaking them then you will always have to choose what minimum standards you will always require and then accept that it might be unreasonable for a software developer to go further.

For example, suppose the entire purpose of a certain office application is to draw some clever visualisation that helps the office workers to understand complex relationships in their business data. Maybe that presentation style has been chosen based on years of experience and saves a lot of time and avoids a lot of mistakes compared to a simple text report or table of figures. However, maybe it also doesn't work for someone whose vision is too limited to usefully see or interact with the visualisation.

Perhaps you could present the same data and relationships in a different way, a format that would be more amenable to sound- or touch-based interfaces for those with severely limited or no vision. In reality, that might mean writing a second entirely separate application, one that might cost more than the original to implement and support, for an audience that will usually be very small and often empty.

So where should the line be drawn? In an ideal world we want to be as inclusive as possible regardless of anyone's individual limitations, but we also want to provide the most effective presentation possible to those who don't have the same limitations. In general doing both might be prohibitively expensive, so how do you make realistic, ethical decisions in this space, and given that every software application is different, how do you codify the standards you want to make mandatory for the accessibility reasons?

The website says:

    Cannot read property 'match' of undefined

    TypeError: Cannot read property 'match' of undefined
    at /var/app/current/routes/avs.js:44:29
    at Layer.handle [as handle_request] (/var/app/current/node_modules/express/lib/router/layer.js:95:5)
    at next (/var/app/current/node_modules/express/lib/router/route.js:137:13)
    at Route.dispatch (/var/app/current/node_modules/express/lib/router/route.js:112:3)
    at Layer.handle [as handle_request] (/var/app/current/node_modules/express/lib/router/layer.js:95:5)
    at /var/app/current/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:281:22
    at param (/var/app/current/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:354:14)
    at param (/var/app/current/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:365:14)
    at param (/var/app/current/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:365:14)
    at Function.process_params (/var/app/current/node_modules/express/lib/router/index.js:410:3)

Flutter for web is not ready and flutter devs seriously should remove those demos because it's ruining reputation of Flutter for Android, iOS and Desktop which is absolutely a delight to work with. I never developed apps for mobile being a backend developer but now I have developed few in record time. Flutter for mobile is amazing and it's going to change the game.

I am not really sure about Flutter for web though.

Add to that, a11y as a 2nd class citizen.

It's basically Flash [1]. What's old is new again.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash

Do you honestly believe they won’t implement copying a sentence.

I honestly believe they WILL implement copy paste...

... along with tracking exactly what you copied, when, where you hovered your mouse, inserting all sorts of features into your copied piece of “plain text”

... along with the ability to force-turn off copying from server side whenever it benefits them.

You WILL use ChromeOS (by another name) and you WILL like it

All of this is done without canvas. Maybe less drama would help.

> All of this is done without canvas.

Currently it’s pretty easy to get around such blocks. Compare with how hard it is to get around modern, proper DRM.

I have faith this implementation will be modern and proper, as the fate of the ad industry and those who rely on it, rely on it.

The copy and paste problem is sidestepped in android by the os native ocr, it might become common elsewhere too.

I can’t tell if you’re being facetious. Text is rendered to a canvas frame buffer and then the solution to text selection involves OCR?

Amusingly, the Amiga lacked cut&paste support in most applications, so someone developed a tool that did precisely that.

Leading to questions like this: http://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=10580.0

I mean, that's how MacPaint was going to work. (They eventually ditched “edit text once it's written” entirely, for fear that people would use MacPaint for word processing, but the code was all written.)

Cab I be facetious and factually describe the current state of affairs simultaneously?

They have played us for absolute fools.

I had these exact complaints about web apps many years ago, and I was dead wrong. Nobody cared that web apps were slow, had/has horrible UX compared to native apps, and feel janky by comparison. These demos elicit similar feelings. Now, they're not as fast as I like, but they feel better than most webapps already. (It reminds me of Flash, actually.)

If the Flutter dev experience is good enough, this will eat traditional web apps slowly. In a way, the web was designed for this sort of scenario: a delivery mechanism agnostic of the client implementation. We've gone from pushing server-generated HTML to megabytes of JS + SPAs, and now a WASM/Canvas hybrid seems inevitable.

It all comes down to how well these perform on mobile devices, what the dev experience is like, and how the end product feels. There's still a lot up in the air, but, I'm honestly impressed with the progress shown by Flutter here. There's still a host of considerations unaddressed (including accessibility) that I hope they have an approach for.

Despite their shortcomings webapps won because they had a number of advantages that native lacked, most of all software distribution.

What has flutter to offer that a regular webapp lacks? (not performance, it seems)

SPAs to Flutter is a much smaller step conceptually than native to Web. Most of the world is using a Blink-based browser of some sort already. Updates are pushed aggressively.

> What has flutter to offer that a regular webapp lacks?

Google branding, novelty, more sane dev UX. I'm not saying those are good reasons to choose it, I'm just extrapolating from how the industry works.

Let's be honest: end users basically just put up with whatever devs release at this point. It doesn't matter if the end product murders battery life, doesn't fit the target platform, and steals their data. It's not like switching to some less-than-web-native framework is somehow a bridge too far for end users.

Your last point made me think: for all the flak the gamer demographic gets for being over entitled and toxic, they seem to actually ultimately end up with nice things like programs that run at a performance you'd expect from a modern computer and don't swamp you with creepily-targeted ads

The fact that it (the same code base with minor changes) runs on desktop and mobile platforms?

Great point. It is striking to me how similar many of the modern languages are for various platforms (thinking of Rust, Kotlin, and Swift here), but it is still quite difficult to share business logic among web, Android, and iOS devices because of language differences.

If Dart/Flutter is good enough for all of those platforms, that is quite the value proposition.

Resume lines.

This is correct, I am afraid.

Unselectable text, and links that are actually javascript so you can't preview them, or open them in new tabs.

But who are we kidding, the web is javascript all the way down now.

It refreshes dormant memories of what Flash used to feel like.

For me the balance is still the same. Fine for highly interactive things such as games. For everything else, ugh...

Or we could take a look at the example Google Doc linked in TFA - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1N1XaAI4ZlCUHNWJBXJUBFjxS...

Seems like it's fast (on my machine at least), can select text and Ctrl+F works. I totally understand the urge to complain and doom say, but could we at least stick to the example at hand? I'm sure if you went through this doc you'd find things to complain about. That would be more relevant to the discussion.

After trying it for a few seconds, noticed X select-to-copy was broken, as well as the browser spellcheck feature that my daughter relies on heavily in Google Docs (where a text area can be spellchecked in french or english depending on the active spellcheck).

I didn't spend more than a few seconds on it, but those were the features I immediately noticed. This is going to be a painful transition for us since she uses both of those a great deal with her schoolwork. Since the doc was read-only, I couldn't test IME/XCompose - hopefully those work at least.

And they speak about plugins being broken in TFA. I'm not surprised that your daughter's plugin doesn't work today, because they announced the change today. Presumably, those plugins can be rewritten to adapt to canvas. Just give them time.

Well, I was referring to the built-in browser spellcheck and the X windows copy/paste. Both of those probably rely more heavily on normal native widgets. Not saying it is impossible of course. The X windows copy/paste could be done using the invisible text approach firefox uses in PDF.js. That would also help with accessibility somewhat.

But I'm not sure how they could integrate with browser spellcheck without basically going back to a less canvas-y approach. Invisible text areas surely would have layout problems aligning with the rendered font. But, I guess we'll see. I'm guessing Linux users are not a major factor in their decisions though. Firefox users probably even less so.

I didn't believe you at first, but then I gave it a try.

Yes, they actually built an email client from which you cannot copy text: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/reply

That's a demo for a gallery, not an e-mail client.

It`s not slow on an old intel i3 laptop and on a motorola one phone. I keep seeing these comments about flutter web with different examples, they are never slow on my old devices. Also you can make the text selectable if you want to.

Which is itself a commentary on the immaturity of the technology. I certainly wouldn't run it in production if I can't trust that all devices of a certain performance level can run it. Random performance issues on top-tier hardware is going to be a non-starter.

Just loaded it and it ran awfully. We all have anecdotal experiences and it doesn’t make yours any less valid than mine but it does point out that they don’t show much besides what you personally experienced.

wdym by awfully? This makes me crazy, the gallery loaded instanltly, every item I click loads instantly, no problem with scrolling. There is a five second loading delay on the phone when the app loads, the items after that open just as fast as on the laptop.

The only thing I saw that didn'r run smoothly on my weak phone is the flutter plasma demo[0], but it runs without any tearing on the laptop.

[0] https://flutterplasma.dev/

I clicked the "Shrine" app on a 6-core MBP, it took about 3 seconds to render the main gallery page and I got an entire 4 frames rendered during that time.

That doesn’t even load on my iPhone 12

there is an option for flutter to compile for both canvaskit and html - and then on mobile might select the latter (for reasons being smaller) - it might be that (not sure).

I have two stupid flutter apps that are canvas only - https://malkia.github.io/game_of_life/ and https://malkia.github.io/tictactoe (but haven't rebuilt them with latest & greatest)

As a user or as a developer?

Developer. Texts aren't selectable on mobile by default and they want the web version to act the same.

It's Flash websites all over again!

Wow, that’s truly a masterpiece in awful. Are they also rendering everything to canvas and then reinventing layouts, controls, etc. to get it so laggy?

Oh boy, I can't even scroll smoothly through these pages...

Web UIs are already an incredibly cut-down implementation of a real OS GUI. I'm not looking forward to something even worse than that.

The demo doesn't have it, but they did fix the selectable text issue, just need to wrap your text in a SelectableText widget.

But this means the default is for text to be unselectable.

Which clearly says all I need to know about it :-/

Yep, I agree. Even though it's normal on mobile devices, it's weird behavior for the web. Given the way flutter is designed (sharable code base, eVeRyThInG iS a WiDgEt), I don't see an easy and obvious solution here.

Yikes. How does the inability to select or search text pass even the most basic of UI/UX and accessibility guidelines?

As a former angularjs user, I’m not keen to learn another framework that will get abandoned or replaced in a few years

I have to agree, it runs really slowly (really struggles on scrolling) on my Macbook Air from last year, which normally runs heavy JS sites just fine.

EDIT: to be fair, it runs quite smoothly on Safari and Google Chrome... only Firefox seems to have trouble with Flutter on the Web for some reason.

That is absolutely horrible. I am only waiting for the day when people start making desktop apps using electron + Flutter on the web.

Flutter for web I don't know where it will be in 5 years but flutter for desktop is going to eat electron apps for sure.

Right now probably some people seeing this on HN will be thinking about it.

And I thought Gemini was not polished enough. It might be a beacon in this potential darkness