Flutter 3.3.0 Is Available | Hacker News Reader

Flutter 3.3.0 Is Available

medium.com

8 pointsg123k5 comments

Weirdly this presentation doesn't emphasize the most important feature to me: global text selection, so anything the user wants to copy, she can copy. Which to me is the best feature of the web.

It's there though, it's named as "selectable text grouping". The other post on 3.3. lays it out better and is more detailed in general:

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32654526

There's a new rendering engine, Impeller. It has Vulkan, Metal and GL ES backends.

Flutter terrifies the snot out of me. Generally Im happy for folks to do whatever & to explore what computing can do. But Flutter has already demonstrated a wilillingness to dominate & subvert the web with it's CanvasKit- all your apps might work on the web, but they're just a bunch of un-hypertextual canvases, utterly opaque things that no extension can touch.

The idea that the web might be subverted from an extensible hypermedium into basically a VNC client for heavyweight apps sounds like an abomination.

At the momemt, there seems to be a gap where the current new-hotness in flutter simply doesnt support the web. But soon shortly I expect these un-DOM horrors will be rendering in webgl or webgpu, that view-source being utterly futile, extensions all being broken, web accessibility tools all weeping to themselves will happen again. Flutter on the web keeps looking like a spite-project.

Hello rektide. You've said this type of comment before on Flutter threads yet I believe it's not as nefarious as you always make it seem. Having used it to make apps, I believe it's as good as claimed, I can write once and run everywhere.

But none of my extensions & normal accessibility tools will work.

I keep pointing out CanvasKit's problems because it's incredibly harmful & retrogressive. That it's convenient for you the app developer doesnt offer any succor to those of us who want to use extensions, accessibility tools we know, and in general obstructs view-source usability.

I dont think it's necessarily nepharious intent ("oh maybe we can make a canvas renderer"...), but my gosh, to even a casual web enthusaist, it so clearly a shortsighted & cruel misuse of the web. It prevents so much of the genetics & capabilities of the web to treat it like a bunch of dumb pixels, prevents so much of the flexibility & ecosystem that html enables from happening, replacing it with solipsistic caring only about yourself.

Given how the web has subverted desktop via Electron and the like, to the annoyance of many, turnabout is fair play.

Not to mention, this is nothing new. We used to have Flash, after all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com