> I stayed away from Flutter at first because it doesn't respect the DOM etc but at this point I'm willing to sell my soul to the devil for how easy it is to make a great UX that deploys anywhere.

Great UX, you say? Great UX!? Flutter’s unashamed pure-canvas approach makes it fundamentally and unfixably awful. Links don’t work because they’re fake (and it’s impossible to fake them), scrolling is atrocious for a significant fraction of users, text handling is obnoxious and wrong… seriously, speaking as a user, I’ve come across things made with Flutter three times in the last four years (plus looking at their demos), and Flutter makes for literally the worst user experience that I have come across in that time.

Now Flutter does actually have a DOM renderer, but it never seems to be used. I’m not entirely sure why. Actually, scratch that, I just went to find a link, and found https://docs.flutter.dev/platform-integration/web/renderers only talking about canvaskit and skwasm, no mention of the html renderer any more… it seems like they deprecated it earlier this year <https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues/145954>, and will presumably remove it some time soon, doubling down on pure-canvas. Well, at least that lets me more unconditionally condemn Flutter for the web.

Text is bad, especially if you use emoji. Links are bad because they’re fake. Scrolling is bad for a decent fraction of users. And none of these three are fixable if you insist on pure-canvas. (Links you could kinda make work tolerably if you were willing to compromise a little, but the other two just can’t be done.)

If you want more substance to my complaints about the pure-canvas approach, search HN comments for “chrismorgan canvas” or similar. I still haven’t finished reducing it to an article on my website.

If you intend to target the web and care about the web at all, please don’t use Flutter.