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Comment by yoavm | Hacker News Reader

Super important article, but I think he missed out on one of the most important points. Google pushes Flutter for web because Flutter is an experience you as a consumer can't control. As a company that makes most of it's money from ads - that's amazing. No more ad-blocking.

Developers, resist. One the Web is built with Flutter it'll not be the Web anymore. It's be like TV.

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People say stuff like this all the time but the truth is that Google as a company has very little direction at the scale of niche software like this. Google as an organization is not pushing Flutter in any meaningful capacity or trying to convince everyone to start adopting it. As a sibling comment asked, how would you expect a search engine giant to go for something that makes the web less indexable? The truth is that Google is a massive company with hundreds of teams that have 0 shared interest in any of their products and operate almost entirely independently.

Yeah, people are saying this all the time, but the truth is that it's exactly the direction to web is taking. I'm not pretending to know how the decision was made, but I am pointing out that it goes very well with their bigger plans for the web (HTTP3, AMP, etc).

I'm 100% sure Google will find a way to index Flutter based-website. I'm also 100% sure it'll be much harder to block ads, using a custom stylesheet, use reader mode, and practically any extension that manipulates the page.

Seconding.

And that's why, unlike some other comments, I worry it will gain traction. Publishers of all kind - news companies, streaming companies, social media - will be more than happy to adopt technologies that take away control over the experience from end users. After all, most of the web already looks like glorified print posters and lifestyle magazines. With Flutter, they'll have the ability to make it impossible for end-users to turn on Reader Mode or remove ads, or branding. The site will look exactly the way the UX experts designed them to, simplifying all kinds of data-driven user abuse.

Now of course, they could've done that already without Flutter. But they didn't, because it's too hard. Regular HTML+CSS+JS are the default. It's what has the mindshare, it's what the devs on the market do, it's what works for everyone, ever since Flash died. It's already good enough to control majority of end-users, so there's no marginal benefit in trying to invent an even more restrictive form of content delivery. It's not worth the time spent fixing bugs and cross-device inconsistencies. But now add a player like Google - with money, mass, and clout - pushing such new solution, and it may be enough. God knows, webdev community just embraces everything Google releases.

I doubt that's true. It's a minor side thing of a project, it's easily explained as done this way because it's the easiest, it's unclear it actually makes adblocking that much harder. It seems unlikely that this is a targeted strategy, companies that size generally suck at that.

Sorry if I wasn't clear - I'm not saying someone sat at a meeting titled "how to stop uBlock Origin" and it ended with Flutter. But I do think the overall approach of Google is let's make the internet more of a controlled experience, and Flutter fits perfectly in that approach.

Nah, Flutter Web clearly grew out of Flutter for smartphones. If the dream is write-once run-anywhere, extending to web is just the obvious next step.

Did you read the parent comment ?

> Nah, Flutter Web clearly grew out of Flutter for smartphones. If the dream is write-once run-anywhere, extending to web is just the obvious next step.

Ok.

> Sorry if I wasn't clear ... I do think the overall approach of Google is let's make the internet more of a controlled experience, and Flutter fits perfectly in that approach.

Of course, and suggesting that Google has an “overall approach” and that Flutter for Web is some nefarious manifestation if it is ridiculous.

the whole screen is a big giant canvas.

I don't necessarily think it was a diberate decision, but Fluttercs CanvasKit is one of the most pernicious evil backwards awful things anyone has done to the web and it absolutely will make ads much much much harder to block.

It uses the web like a vnc session to the app. It is an absolutely sickening perversion of the web & oh it so happens such ads will be unblockable, there'll be no imgs nor divs nor anything else to block, just one massive canvas pushing pixels at you. Gobsmackingly horrible regression for the web, & I am so so so glad someone did a proper job writing up this horrorshow.

Oh, fully agreed that it's a terrible idea on many levels that should be reserved for very niche scenarios(I don't think it's totally useless, and would be curious how well it can be expanded to add accessibility features if the developer cooperates). I just think negligence/ignorance/bad priorities are more likely explanations.

(another technical argument: today you seldom see ads being served from the app domain, despite it being not that difficult and an easy way around domain blocks, because the ad industry doesn't trust that model - so even if the rendering is obfuscated, at least for now ads from Google would still be fetched through stoppable network requests for anti-fraud reasons)

I've heard it suggested that you can build an application fully in canvas but also leave behind a semantic and accessible skeleton for screen readers and crawlers

The two are not two different worlds. Screen-readers might be able to function off a semantic skeleton. But, as the author mentions, tools like Vimium are just going to be forever screwed over, totally shot the hell out of the water, by this post-hypertext abomination. CanvasKit!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry to take your example too literally, but I suspect ad blockers still might work, because at the end, it's really just JavaScript. The network panel still shows everything the app does. Plus when I see the source code, it's still just transpiled js, and even uses standard js libraries, like Google analytics, which are not written in dart.

It still hypothetically works, it's just much harder and not generalizable, so you'd have to write features specifically for flutter websites.

Don't ad blockers already have special filters for special websites?

I specialize in runtime code modification ecosystems who happens to work on a (non-Web) Flutter app, and I don't see any intrinsic reason why Flutter will be somehow fundamentally worse for ad blocking than HTML/JavaScript, simply because of its rendering technique: the issue should only come down to how the code is structured and executed and how much of the semantics can be recovered at runtime. So, on such note, I have not examined the output of the Flutter Web compiler to see if it is ridiculously obfuscated... have you? Again, it isn't at all the case that the way it renders matters: it only matters how easy the behavior is to automatically and safely edit. (Frankly, the end game on ads is AI that does its thing on the resulting view: nothing else makes any sense, as it involves people who are incentivized to not help you to choose to help you.)

But can Google index what's in a Flutter app?

Maybe not right now, but they'll figure out a way. They figured out how to do it with SPAs.

If there's a way to index, isn't there a way to find and block ads?

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