I have heard that WASM and potentially some engine upgrades could aid the performance but I think it's still too early to say they'll be a definite fix, I'm looking forward to testing it out though once it lands.
Hopefully it helps out on lower end mobile browsers too as that's where Flutter Web really tends to chug.
> I'm not sure I understand the distinction between web apps and web sites. Don't both of those experiences need to be accessible?
The distinction as I understand is websites are usually more document-orientated focused mostly on reading (e.g. a blog, or even Hacker News), whereas web apps are more focused on user-interaction (e.g. spreadsheet apps, email apps).
Due to Flutter's large bundle size and long initial load time it's definitely not suitable for things like news sites or blogs where initial load, SEO, and readability are all important.
I would agree they both need to be accessible, but there's also extra cons to Flutter Web that make it not the best choice for websites even if it did accessbility perfectly.
As a Flutter dev, this article is a good summary of some of the reasons I urge people not to choose Flutter if they're mainly aiming to target the web.
At the company I work at we currently target 5 platforms across our internal and user-facing apps, (Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, Web), and Web is the one that consistently seems to cause the most issues. Performance is a big one of them, I've done about 8 years of webdev now and there is a noticable performance difference between using a canvas-drawn UI in Flutter and the usual React-based equivalent.
We've mostly stuck to using it for internal applications, as well as for a small portion of our user-base that prefer to access our user-facing mobile app via a desktop. It also serves as a decent backup deployment target if you need to push a hotfix for some users and can't wait for the App Store review to go through.
It doesn't seem like the Semantic HTML issue will ever be solved too, the Flutter team did mention in the latest conference that they're aiming it more to be used for web apps than websites.
For the other platforms however it works great, and I'd definitely recommend it for anyone looking to make a cross-platform app that doesn't need to rely heavily on working on web.
Hopefully it helps out on lower end mobile browsers too as that's where Flutter Web really tends to chug.