Google LLC today provided a technical update on its popular Flutter development tool, sharing details on how it’s upgrading the software to enable new, more sophisticated web applications.

Flutter is an open-source framework that makes it easier to build user interfaces for applications. It’s used by about 500,000 engineers worldwide and plays a notable role in Google’s developer strategy.

Because the user interface is such a foundational component of applications, including Android and Chrome OS applications, reducing the amount of work involved in building those interfaces is a way for Google to support the developer ecosystem around its products. 

Flutter’s hallmark feature is cross-platform support. Developers who use the tool only need to create an interface once and it will work automatically across Android, iOS, Windows and Linux, which cuts the amount of time required to build cross-platform services. Flutter can also be used to build interfaces for web applications, which is the focus of today’s technical update from Google.

The search giant detailed a number of enhancements it’s been working on to make Flutter more useful for web development. These include support for applications with more sophisticated graphics, performance improvements and the addition of certain essential basic features.

Flutter by default render visuals using the HTML DOM, the technology browsers use to organize web pages. Google has added in an experimental feature that allows applications to use the high-performance Skia graphics engine instead for this task. Skia, which is notable for being the engine that Google’s Chrome browser uses to perform practically all graphics-related operations, can provide faster rendering speeds than Flutter’s default HTML DOM rendering.

The practical upshot is that the technology could enable developers to build more visually rich web applications. One early adopter, design software provider Rive Inc., has already rewritten its namesake animation platform to use Flutter and the Skia-powered browser rendering features. 

Another way Google is enhancing Flutter is by speeding up the loading of text inside applications, a basic but essential process. Google today detailed a new opt-in feature in Flutter that developers can enable to speed up the rendering of text layouts by up to sixfold.  In the same spirit of enabling snappier interfaces, the search giant is also working to speed up application scrolling performance. 

Lastly, the search giant will soon add a number of basic features which have been missing from Flutter so far to make web applications work more smoothly. These include support for the back button in browsers and keyboard-based scrolling, as well as the ability to copy and paste text. 

Image: Google