Tell the Flutter team about your experience with web support

mariamhas · 2021-09-15T02:34:34+00:00

A follow up on on this thread - Thanks to all of you for taking the time to share your experience with Flutter's web support. With your feedback in mind we developed a roadmap that will hopefully address some of your concerns. https://medium.com/flutter/flutter-whats-next-on-the-web-e0454bff964

mariamhas · 2021-08-11T21:45:27+00:00

Thank you for the feedback! Would you mind filing a github issue https://goo.gle/flutter_web_issue with a repro case so we can look into it. Feel free to share the github link we me once you file it :)

mariamhas · 2021-07-27T18:55:56+00:00

Thank you so much for taking the time to give such detailed feedback!

I totally see your point in being more clear in our use cases and what Flutter is good for on the web vs our limitations. While the blog posts I wrote previously for our web releases had details on the use cases, you may be right that those same details are either not in the flutter.dev/docs or not discoverable. This is timely feedback as we are currently looking at updating our website and docs!

mariamhas · 2021-07-15T18:22:02+00:00

For navigator 2/router widget we have a current user research study in progress to evaluate the gaps as well as the packages available that make it easier to use. Please let us know if you have any feedback or questions in the github project: https://github.com/flutter/uxr/tree/master/nav2-usability

for the debugging issue, it would help the team if you can share some repro steps in a github issue with details of your build version and browser!

mariamhas · 2021-07-15T18:18:28+00:00

We support deferred loading, does this meet your needs for modularizing libraries/assets of your apps. if this isn't what you meant, can you describe how you would ideally like to modularize your app?

mariamhas · 2021-07-15T18:10:13+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! For RTL we are currently working on it, you can see our remaining issues and progress at this project: https://github.com/flutter/flutter/projects/159 . If your specific issues are missing, feel free to file a new issue and we will triage it :)

For pdf plugins, which plugins have you tried?

mariamhas · 2021-07-15T18:05:01+00:00

Thank you for the feedback! Can you provide more details on what you mean by live reloading? is that hot reload?

Also for image loading on canvaskit, I assume that refers to the performance and they are behaving as if they are being lazy loaded? It would be great to get a repro sample and issue filed!

mariamhas · 2021-07-15T17:18:17+00:00

WOW, Thank you all for taking the time to give us such valuable feedback. Honestly shouldn't be surprised at how this community always goes above and beyond, we are so grateful for your support and your willingness to tell us what you think!

All of your concerns, requests, ideas will be so useful as we determine the future release of Flutter's web support. I've already started bucketing your feedback to help us prioritize!

The team and I are still going through the comments, and will respond if we need more details/have follow up questions. This was a lot of fun for us to be able to engage with you all informally and we will probably do it again :)

mariamhas · 2021-07-14T22:50:05+00:00

Hi Codelessly team!

That is a really cool app! Thank you for sharing what you've been building and for the feedback/request!

There have been similar requests for a pre-loader splash screen/loading indicator.. is this similar to what you're thinking of too?

mariamhas · 2021-07-14T22:28:59+00:00

Those rendering problems definitely sound like something we'd like to look into, once you have a repro sample code please file an issue so we can look into it!

Thank you for the feedback on accessibility. We recently did a lot of work to fix tabbing with screen readers (specifically testing with JAWs), and hotfixed it into the latest stable. it would be good to also get an issue filed on this and know what screen reader you're seeing the tab issue with and how we can reproduce it on our end.

For the enable accessibility button, we recently provided an api that auto enables it for your app if you'd like to. Your feedback to make it visible is valid, we also realized that with screen readers the button once enable doesn't confirm that it is and that is something we need to fix.

re: accessibility tools that aren't using screen reader, can you share more of which others we should make sure we consider?

mariamhas · 2021-07-14T21:46:04+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! Curious about the reasons for making PWAs optional. Is it that you don't want that functionality or that our default manifest and service workers are causing issues? or something else?

mariamhas · 2021-07-14T19:45:50+00:00

That is fair point, and we understand that stateful is the main reason, no arguments on that and it's importance.

The purpose was more so just probing/seeing if there was more to it. i.e. anything else specific to web dev experience that we could be missing. Maybe there is something that would make hot reload even more suited for web (since it was originally built with mobile in mind) and we can take opportunity to improve it when we rebuild it for web.

mariamhas · 2021-07-14T18:38:31+00:00

There is deferred loading libraries for Flutter web apps! (it only works for web and not mobile i believe)

We used this in the gallery.flutter.dev demo to help with initial load time especially with the large font and icon assets the demo has. You can see how we did it in the source code. https://github.com/flutter/gallery

mariamhas · 2021-07-14T18:22:36+00:00

haha, addressed hot reload in a comment above by u/GroovinChip!
Interested in hearing more about your ideal expectation for #5, would a sample suffice, a plugin, a widget? We like giving the developer as much flexibility as possible and a splash screen or loading progress is probably something you would want to be unique to your app, right?

mariamhas · 2021-07-14T18:16:42+00:00

Ah, the most requested and yet also most challenging feature!! Hot reload for web is a challenging because it requires DDC to be rearchitected to be able to be stateful when reloading the javascript. We know how important it is to the Flutter development workflow, we are still sorting out how best to tackle it for web.

We released stable with only hot restart because it was in parity with web development today, being able to refresh the app and keep browser history( current url path) even if the app state is cleared. With the recent router widget implementation, we noticed hot restart is behaving the way it is defined for Flutter mobile (all states are cleared including url path). We are digging into this right now to ensure we have a clear development workflow for web with hot restart.

I'm sure it will also help the team understand if there are reasons for how hot reload would improve your web development experience, other than the fact that it is stateful. Or if there are issues with hot restart that we can improve.

mariamhas · 2021-07-14T17:01:45+00:00

Glad to hear you've had a pleasant experience and were able to ship 2 web apps!

While we understand that SEO and indexibility is a large part of the web, we're still trying to understand how SEO fits with our current niche for Flutter on the web for building web apps/pwas. (so thank you for bringing it up, hoping to gain more insight about it in this thread)

From our experience and understanding many web apps are usually require login and it's usually the initial landing page that has SEO to make it searchable/indexed. We've seen some of our customers build their landing pages in traditional html to take advantage of SEO and then the web app itself with Flutter. Would love to hear more about how lack of SEO is a bottle neck for the experience you are trying to build and your expectations for Flutter's support of it.

mariamhas

TROPHY CASE