[randomchars]

The idea sounds very appealing, especially to an indie developer: being able to ship your app on multiple platforms from a single codebase is kind of the holy grail. Unfortunately, the result is....

I tested this Flutter example[1], on a 16" MBP with and i7, and it is janky as it can get, it feels like I'm using a 15 year old computer. From the code it looks like the whole thing is... rendered on canvas? I'll pass.

[1]: https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/

[ryanwhitney]

Wow, this is some of the worst scrolling I’ve experienced on the web in a long time. Incredibly weird and not smooth at all on both a newer iPhone and Mac. Can’t copy text either.

[anthropodie]

Flutter web is not ready. They should just stop advertising flutter web. It is ruining reputation of Flutter for Android/iOS.

[murermader]

I just tried it on an iPad Pro with Safari. Clicking the tiles does not work, scrolling does not work with the touchpad, and overall it feels very janky. They probably didn‘t care to optimize / make it usable with Safari.

[danudey]

Trying it on Windows 10 with Firefox. Scrolling is incredibly slow, in every possible way. The scroll wheel barely moves the content, so I have to spin the wheel ten or more times to get any reasonable distance down the page, and the animation is janky and stuttery.

Works great in Chrome though, what a surprise!

[ygra]

I remember getting accurate values from the scroll wheel being the worst in Firefox and basically impossible. You could only get the scroll direction, but not the correct extent (bascially everything just looked like one detent). So you either get incredibly fast scrolling, or incrediby slow scrolling, depending on how you work with the value and whether you still do the oft-needed division by 120. This can also make some touch pads that generate mouse wheel events very unusable for zooming or scrolling.

You can see the difference in the example on MDN as well: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/whe...

The scaling there works with very different speeds in Firefox and Chrome because both disagree on what value the delta should have. Scrolling up once yields -100 in Edgeium for me and -3 in Firefox.

[danielscrubs]

Here is a dart benchmark:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

I don’t think it’s an issue with Safari.

[mda]

Those benchmarks are meaningless. Implementations and algorithms ised are wildy differenet, not testing similar things.

[mda]

Well, to give counterpoint, just tested on Chrome / Windows (ok-ish CPU, decent GPU) all demos are buttery smooth no lag or jank whatsoever.

[sydd]

I've tested on my phone (1yr old pretty good Android one) and the whole thing is very laggy runs with like 10fps. What about a11y?

The whole thing feels like Adobe Flex in 2010. It solves a great deal of problems that the web had but introduced a plethora of others.

[eseidelGoogle]

[Flutter Eng. Dir. here]

Still relatively early days for Flutter Web, so I would not be shocked if it's not buttery everywhere. However, we would certainly love to learn more. fluter.dev/support has links as to how to file an issue if you're interested.

https://flutterplasma.dev/ is one demo to try. We expect to be updating flutter.dev/web and flutter.dev/showcase to update more over time.

[qbasic_forever]

The plasma demo you linked runs at a stuttery 40fps on Firefox (ubuntu 20.10) on a quad core Ryzen 5 laptop. The fans immediately spin to max speed. I'm not impressed...

Here's a hard question, why is this surprising to you? What are you missing in development--is this a gap in testing? Are you hamstrung without support internally to bake this as long as it needs? Rather than double-down on extolling the virtues here, it's time to double-down on fixing the team and the product.

[agucova]

I got 14 fps with heavy stuttering and freezing with my i5-9300H with 8 cores :(

[Jyaif]

60 fps on a 2016 macbook. Maybe you don't have GPU acceleration enabled?

[sriku]

Sorry but the plasmadev demo doesn't pass muster compared to 60fps animations we were able to do years ago with html+js. Something about the renderer approach is causing hiccups in the animation.

"Buttery smooth animations and scrolling" will be a great selling point for flutter ..if it actually works.

(Firefox)

[sriku]

I'd say a goal of "do useful stuff extremely well and complex stuff reasonably well" would make for a good demo.

[the_duke]

As usual for Google products, this works fine in Chrome on a decently powerful desktop.

Not up to the speed of well-written Javascript, but definitely viable.

In contrast, this is completely unusable on other browsers or on lower powered devices.

On Firefox desktop, initial loading brings a "This page seems to be stuck" prompt. Once it finally loads, clicking the play button just does nothing.

Please note that for 80+% of websites/apps, Firefox is faster or on par with Chrome for me. Google products and some other exceptions are the only ones that are consistently slow on Firefox. Whether that's intentional or just a lack of testing, I can't say.

Similarly unusable on Safari.

On lower powered devices this just freezes Chrome for me.

As I mentioned in other comments, I like Flutter, but Flutter Web is not anywhere close to being viable for production use.

[kuschku]

Have you ever tried one of your demos in Firefox on Mobile and Desktop?

They're completely unusable in Firefox. For example, it only scrolls 3 pixels per rotation of the scroll wheel on Windows 10

[oblio]

Firefox is on the Google chopping block. They won't admit it but they're killing it by a thousand CSS cuts.

[SanderNL]

Why are you guys here on HN still using Chrome? There is literally not a single reason I can think of to be supporting this behemoth that is killing the open web. Firefox is excellent actually and Firebug IMO is far superior to Chrome's offering. I understand non-techies using it like they used Explorer, but come on guys.

[dmitriid]

> However, we would certainly love to learn more.

It's... It's very easy to learn more for yourself.

- Ask your company to provide you with a MacBook Air (not the M1, a regular one) or a mid-tier PC

- Use any browser other than Chrome (and other thank Blink-based browsers)

- Go and use the very same demos you so proudly present

Boom. Learning.

[EvilEy3]

Why is this downvoted?

[sydd]

Thanks for the reply! What about a11y? Can you navigate a Flutter page via keyboard? What about screen reader support?

[timsneath]

Yes, we consider accessibility a must-have feature. On the web, we have a second DOM tree called the SemanticsNode tree, which is generated in parallel to the RenderObject DOM tree. The SemanticsNode tree translates the flags, actions, labels, and other semantic properties into ARIA attributes. We've been testing Windows Narrator, VoiceOver, TalkBack, and ChromeVox screen readers to navigate a Flutter web app.

[mwcampbell]

So why is FlutterPlasma.dev completely unusable with a screen reader even after pressing the "turn on accessibility" button? I understand that the actual demo presentation might not be accessible, but the intro screen should be fully readable, and it's not.

Edit: You may want to add the NVDA open-source screen reader for Windows to your list. And when you test with a screen reader, make sure you use it the way an actual user would when browsing the web, e.g. using NVDA's browse mode with the arrow keys to move through the page.

[marcusjt]

NVDA is the primary screen reader for 40.6% of them (swiftly followed by JAWS at 40.1%) so why aren't you testing with it? https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/#primary

[dbjacobs]

On my iPhone 12 mini the demo took 13 seconds to show me something besides a blank screen. On my desktop it was around 3 seconds and cpu usage went through the roof.

[marcusjt]

FWIW the plasma demo runs at something like 50fps in Chrome on my 3yr old Samsung Galaxy S9, and only a bit worse in Firefox (perhaps 40fps) - so they are not buttery smooth experiences, but neither are they terrible.

[bsimpson]

Oooff, the edges in that demo look terrible - particularly the grey boxes in perspective. The demo boasts that it isn't a video, but the interpolation looks as bad as one.

I hate to be critical - I'm sure a lot of work has gone into this - but there's still lots of room for improvement too.

[jpxw]

flutterplasma.dev just shows a blank screen for me on iOS safari. Every few refreshes I can can get the content to show for a split second before it goes back to white...

[EvilEy3]

> early days

> production ready

Pick one.

[deft]

No, I won't help you. The OP post is about how great flutter is and you're in the comments telling everyone it will actually be useable soon and asking us to test it for you on common browsers.

[skavi]

Another data point is the new flutter Google Pay app vs the old version. On my iPhone 11 Pro, the former is incredibly laggy. The latter is as smooth as you’d expect given the hardware.

[ROARosen]

iPhone 6s, the new Google Pay app is disastrously laggy to point of being unusable

[onion2k]

Is that a counterpoint? To me that tells me performance is going to vary between users computers, possibly due to something other than resources. That means the experience I'd be delivering won't be consistent and I probably won't be able to fix it, or even replicate it, reliably. Something that's janky everywhere can be profiled, debugged and possibly fixed. Something that has an unknown problem that only affects some users is far more problematic.

That isn't a counterpoint to say the language might be worth considering. That's an additional data point to give me reasons to not use it yet.

[tigger0jk]

Just tested https://gallery.flutter.dev/#/crane in Chrome and Safari on Mac and if I go to another tab and then back to the fly tab it just shows a gray screen. Does not inspire confidence.

[anthk]

> and it is janky as it can get, it feels like I'm using a 15 year old computer.

Ironically computers 15-20 years ago with native software ran much, much much faster and snappier. KDE3, XFCE, even Windows 98SE and XP were much faster. They were crippled by disk I/O, true, but once the software loaded, the feedback was inmediate.

[OvermindDL1]

Just as a bit of counterpoint, I'm still running the same hardware right now as I was 12 to 15 years ago with KDE3, nowadays KDE5 is so much faster than KDE3 ever was. Yes I need to upgrade badly, yes I was planning to just a few months ago, but prices seem a bit crazy now, so I'm still continuing with my ancient but somehow still operational hardware.

[anthk]

How so? I tried Plasma 5 on Slackware -current on my AMD Turion and KDE3 (from a Trinity slackbuild) was much faster.

[e12e]

I'm seriously considering looking at something like https://heaps.io/ for cross platform utilities rather than flutter etc. i suppose accessability is likely to still be an issue, as well as ciustom (not native) widgets -but at least the resource usage and interaction is likely to work?

note that heap+haxe is pretty much "the same" as flutter/dart - a language, a compiler and a runtime + a rendering engine..

[adam12]

No jank in Firefox. It does take 10 scrolls to move 6 inches, though.

[cybuerg]

That sounds pretty janky to me...

[Dylan16807]

Jank as in stuttering, not as in shoddy.

[terhechte]

Interestingly I've tried it on Brave on a M1, and it is very smooth. I also tried their Plasma demo and it was very smooth (https://flutterplasma.dev/) but that might say more about the M1 than Flutter.

[malkia]

If it's running on canvas, normally you would see "unpkg.com/canvaskit-wasm" - and even then it may not be the latest (supposedly more optimized) version. For example, my simple Super Tic Tac Toe app - uses it - https://malkia.github.io/tictactoe/#/ - but the gallery was compiled to use HTML, instead of canvas - which would be slower (IMHO). I think there is even mixed mode - where it can choose one or another ("fat" binary on the web ;)).

Please look at the Source (in chrome) to compare.

[ttt0]

It is. I have wasm disabled and it throws an error:

    Uncaught ReferenceError: WebAssembly is not defined

and it includes what you mentioned, unpkg.com/canvaskit-wasm@0.24.0/bin/canvaskit.js:150

[malkia]

Ah, you are right - not sure how I missed it first time, but now I see it.

[etaioinshrdlu]

I think this particular demo might also just be a badly designed demo.

[randomchars]

Well, this was the most prominently featured demo. Is there a demo somewhere that's not badly designed?

[seisvelas]

I can't highlight text on any of the example pages. I want to like this idea so much but wow

[ddevault]

It is very janky, and worse, totally unaccessible, rendering it useless (or frustrating at best) for huge numbers of the population. And why? It's just yet another shiny web framework. We've known how to build websites for decades now.

[shawnz]

Agreed... How can they be proud to release such an extreme regression in usability and accessibility? It is entirely 100% inaccessible for anyone not using a visual user agent. And this somehow isn't considered a non-starter?

[JohnTHaller]

Really bad on Firefox on Windows 10 64-bit (latest) with an i7-7700k and GTX-1060 6GB as well

[gagege]

What's up with scrolling on all these demos? It feels insanely slow and jerky.

[qbasic_forever]

This site physically hurts my fingers to scroll on a trackpad.

[reddotX]

works fine on Ubuntu 20.04 / linux (4year old i5)