Flutter now has less stutter and plays nicer with the web
&gt; <i>Flutter is also learning to get along better with the web. Previously, Flutter developers had to choose whether they wanted web builds to render with the HTML renderer – producing a combination of HTML elements, CSS, Canvas elements, and SVG elements – or with the CanvasKit renderer, which produces graphics rather than readable source code. Its latest trick is element embedding, which lets Flutter content be added to any web page within a &lt;div&gt; element. It thus becomes part of the Document Object Model (DOM) and can be manipulated using CSS selectors and transformations.</i><p>CanvasKit continues to terrify me as one of the utmost &amp; highest existential threats to the web; instead of a hypertext engine it turns the web into a way to push pixels in people&#x27;s faces, and the &quot;canvas&quot; mentality is an evil one.<p>So I&#x27;m not sure whether to be happy about the news here or more distressed. CanvasKit can seemingly now interoperate alongside the html+svg native renderer, rather than be all consuming. On the one hand, yay, folks are less likely to completely wreck the experience &amp; build some purely forsaken Flash like anti-web hell. But now it may be easier to mix little Flash-isms in, little daubs of anti-web, and god-forbid that give CanvasKit enough wiggle room to start making it in the door.<p>&gt; <i>&quot;Historically, people built for the web using the Document Object Model and HTML,&quot; explained Sneath. &quot;And that was kind of the only way to build web apps. Now, over the last couple of years, between Canvas and WebAssembly, we&#x27;ve got these new technologies that enable a different class of web app experience. And so Flutter is unapologetically aiming at that next-generation class.&quot;</i><p>Very sad to hear such a strongly anti-web, chest-thumping, perspective so prominently featured. This isn&#x27;t a different class of web app; if you abandon the DOM you strip away user-agency, you blow up user-extensions, you wreck all the accessibility tools, then you&#x27;ve reduced the web to an app delivery platform. The &quot;next-generation class&quot; sounds like &quot;we use the web as an app delivery platform&quot;. It sounds ok for developers, terrible for everyone else.<p>&gt; <i>We&#x27;re aiming at this next class of apps that look very much like the kinds of apps that Flutter is designed to solve – high graphical fidelity, offering pixel level of control over apps, having a canvas where you can draw and manage every part of the environment yourself.&quot; ®</i><p>Canvas just isn&#x27;t very web. It&#x27;s not malleabe, it&#x27;s not flexible. Every time this guy opens his mouth, it sounds like a worse betrayal of the web than last time, like a worse deal for users.<p>This idea that user-agency is irrelevant, that hypermedia &amp; exchange of information is not on the radar at all, the maximalist view that pushing pixels in people&#x27;s faces is the only thing that matters continues to strike me as anti-human, as destructive &amp; detrimental to humankind, for some very top-down-control oriented short-term wins. It&#x27;s poisoning what we might build, to enable a very narrow clade of people to dictate to the world what we can ever do. Seeing the ethos so strongly said is a revolting thing to keep seeing, &amp; it&#x27;s said with such obvious lack of concern for the user. I really wish someone would reel these spokespeople in a bit, &amp; have some balance, show some respect for user-agency, but the whole project feels like a bank against that, caring only for appdev. This is why I always thought webdev was so good: it permitted the whole world to also be stakeholders, where-as apps have always been too afraid to negotiate control.<p>Anyhow... while Fuchsia is getting a lot of coverage as a part of the recent layouts, it&#x27;s remarkable how wildly high-profile the efforts here in Flutter are. Building a new rendering engine, Flutter? Wow. The Skia rendering engine has, so far, been the one Google-ism in the stack that has been uncontested, untouched, uncompeted with, and now there&#x27;s competition.