[jeroenhd]

My experience with Flutter applications in the browser is absolutely terrible. Rather unfortunate, as the things Flutter promised would make it excellent for web applications like these.

The concept behind the way these platform renders is very similar, so the new Amazon UI may be terrible as well, but I wouldn't expect whoever made the GUI framework they use now to make the same mistakes Flutter made.

Edit: after looking into this some more, it looks like the approach Amazon took is quite different from most Rust UI libraries. They have written their own framework that basically re-implements React but entirely on the WebAssembly side. I don't think it works by throwing a <canvas> onto the screen and implementing a browser rendering engine in JS+WASM like Flutter does. They also seem to target native code where they do all the rendering themselves, but probably faster because they control all the layers and don't need to build a general-purpose UI engine for their video player with extra steps.

[mixmastamyk]

Why is a browser required for "living room devices?"

[mathgeek]

From the article:

> … but also in browsers because some living room devices today have just an HTML5 browser and don't even have flash space big enough to put our native C++ engine.

[jeroenhd]

Ask the people buying and making those devices, not the people trying to get their services to work on them.

The answer is probably "because the alternative is worse". I too would rather make a single web app than separate Tizen/tvOS/WebOS/Android/whatever Roku runs apps.

[mixmastamyk]

I suppose, but Flutter on a Rasberry Pi-like device is compelling as well.

[j45]

It would be helpful to know what version of flutter you experienced this with, your comment caught my attention at least, thanks.

[jeroenhd]

My latest bad experience was whatever version fluffychat used last December, thst was the most recent time I've tried to make a web app work for me. Before that, every version of Flutter I've tried myself, both in debug and release builds. The UI is stuttery and unresponsive in a way that's not happening in mobile platforms, although even on desktop platforms I find the latency rather high. That also includes some rather small Flutter desktop+web applications I've written myself.

It seems like Flutter apps run better in Chrome, but I'm on Firefox. Could be a Flutter optimisation issue or something in Flutter triggering a Firefox bug. Whatever it is, it's making me avoid Flutter web apps.

[j45]

My understanding is the web app can stutter, but the builds for the rest were OK?

I wonder if Flutter could run via wasm in browser.