I can't say that matches my generally nice experience with the demos on desktop, although mobile scrolling was pretty bad.
As you mention yourself, Flutter Web already implements some things using the DOM and is clearly capable of doing so, it's just a matter of degree. I can believe that Flutter would benefit a lot from using the DOM more, but that could change any time by some Flutter contributor saying "hm the custom tab ordering impl doesn't work too well, let's render a DOM tree for tabs" or something similar for ARIA attributes, text inputs, etc. It's hardly a fatal or intractable issue with the architecture.
Many of these complaints are real issues that Flutter should tackle but they feel pretty overblown. There's a general tenor that jumps from "there are still many issues" to "what's even the point of Flutter Web if it can't get everything right". Flutter Web has to start somewhere and good desktop browser support (which is hardly unusable) is good enough for many real use cases. I don't think anyone is selling it as a mature second iteration which seems like a misunderstanding of the v2 semantic version which applies to the core framework, not Flutter Web that just left beta. If there's any org I trust to do the difficult work of cross-platform support, it's Google which already provides the lion's share of funding, standards design and implementation development to the web. IIRC Flutter's dev team also has Chrome engineers on it. I expect it to attract the attention of more orgs as it matures and hopefully becomes more popular, the core framework has already received open source contributions from Microsoft and Canonical.
> they're not building an entirely new render engine from scratch
The web platform builds an entirely new render engine from scratch. Native OS platforms give you a lot for free too and you see the exact same complaints about the web's independent behavior proven irrelevant again and again as the web/Electron continue to demonstrate incredible value despite reinventing many wheels.
Well, no, I'm claiming that it is a matter of approach, not just degree. There are two ways you can go about syncing the DOM to your rendering. Tabbing is a good example of that:
A) you can build a DOM tree, listen to a focusin event, and then when an input/link element gets focus, you can update your Canvas to match the state of the DOM. This means that you listen to one event and (with some exceptions) your rendering engine mostly just has to worry about rendering. Or
B) you can build a Canvas, reimplement tabbing, mouse selection, touch events, and everything else... and then when your new implementation decides that focus is changing, you can update the DOM to match your Canvas. In short, you can choose to have the Canvas drive the DOM, rather than having the DOM drive the Canvas.
What I'm arguing is that approach B, which Flutter seems to be using, is fundamentally much, much harder, buggier, and less performant than approach A -- and my evidence for that is that GUI frameworks surrounding Rust, Silverlight, and C# that are following similar approaches to A are almost all much more mature than Flutter is, despite having fewer corporate resources devoted to them. I'm arguing that path B is an high-level architectural decision that is not going to yield performant, high-quality results.
> The web platform builds an entirely new render engine from scratch.
Right, but again, the web platform at this point has spent over 20 years doing that, and for the majority of that time it would not have been realistic to build a project like Electron. A lot of this seems to come down to, "is the Flutter team big enough to handle this". I don't think they are, but maybe I'm wrong.
I mean, we can debate this endlessly, or next year Flutter v3 can start releasing demos that can handle smooth scrolling and don't lag in Firefox. My prediction is that Flutter is not going to turn into a performant, good quality target for the web any time within the next couple of years. But again, maybe I'm wrong, and luckily it will be very easy to verify if I am. I'll check back in January 2022 and see if anything has changed.
As you mention yourself, Flutter Web already implements some things using the DOM and is clearly capable of doing so, it's just a matter of degree. I can believe that Flutter would benefit a lot from using the DOM more, but that could change any time by some Flutter contributor saying "hm the custom tab ordering impl doesn't work too well, let's render a DOM tree for tabs" or something similar for ARIA attributes, text inputs, etc. It's hardly a fatal or intractable issue with the architecture.
Many of these complaints are real issues that Flutter should tackle but they feel pretty overblown. There's a general tenor that jumps from "there are still many issues" to "what's even the point of Flutter Web if it can't get everything right". Flutter Web has to start somewhere and good desktop browser support (which is hardly unusable) is good enough for many real use cases. I don't think anyone is selling it as a mature second iteration which seems like a misunderstanding of the v2 semantic version which applies to the core framework, not Flutter Web that just left beta. If there's any org I trust to do the difficult work of cross-platform support, it's Google which already provides the lion's share of funding, standards design and implementation development to the web. IIRC Flutter's dev team also has Chrome engineers on it. I expect it to attract the attention of more orgs as it matures and hopefully becomes more popular, the core framework has already received open source contributions from Microsoft and Canonical.
> they're not building an entirely new render engine from scratch
The web platform builds an entirely new render engine from scratch. Native OS platforms give you a lot for free too and you see the exact same complaints about the web's independent behavior proven irrelevant again and again as the web/Electron continue to demonstrate incredible value despite reinventing many wheels.