
Web support for Flutter goes beta - T-1000
https://medium.com/flutter/web-support-for-flutter-goes-beta-35b64a1217c0
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pier25
Is there any demo online with the beta version? I'm very skeptical about
Flutter for web but I'd like to be proven wrong.

IMO it'd make more sense if they gave priority to desktop. The world
desperately needs a good Electron alternative.

~~~
Hixie
Here are some:

\-
[https://developertest.codemagic.app/](https://developertest.codemagic.app/)

\- [https://flutter.github.io/samples/](https://flutter.github.io/samples/)

\-
[https://hillelcoren.github.io/invoiceninja/](https://hillelcoren.github.io/invoiceninja/)

~~~
pier25
So I loaded the samples app and only the _main.dart.js_ was 1.75MB...

No thanks.

~~~
Hixie
It's a pretty big app. I'd be curious to see how big the equivalent app built
using Web technologies directly would be.

That said, yes, if you want small download sizes on the Web then Flutter isn't
the technology for you.

Concretely: our minimal overhead is about 300KB gzipped currently. We expect
that to go down a bit before we exit beta, but a "hello world" in Flutter for
Web will never get down to the few dozen bytes that you could get using pure
HTML.

Fundamentally our approach will always have a large overhead compared to other
Web technologies because we don't use most of the built-in features that
browsers bring to the table like CSS and HTML and so on. We have our own
layout, our own compositing, our own gesture detector, etc. We even blink our
own cursor. The only features we use are the lowest-level ones like `canvas`
that are needed to actually push pixels to the screen, or ARIA which is needed
to expose the accessibility tree.

On the plus side that means you can do anything you want. You want the text
cursor to look like a wiggling snake with eyes that follow the mouse cursor?
No problem. You want a checkbox that exactly matches the Material Design spec?
Or that exactly matches the iOS design language? No problem. The cost is that
all that code has to ship with your app.

~~~
pier25
> _Fundamentally our approach will always have a large overhead compared to
> other Web technologies_

Which begs the question, why even bring Flutter to the web in the first place
or make it a priority over desktop?

