Flutter Web rendering and Chrome Update

Help
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1

I have recently ran into a problem in Flutter Web.

When I run my app in whatever mode, the app’s UI does not render. The app’s background tasks, i.e, API calls, controllers initialization etc is working just fine but the UI doesn’t render. The issue is that the new Chrome update disables the “Automatic fallback to software WebGL.” And requires the user to enable the “Override software rendering list” flag in Chrome. If I do that, then Chrome requires a re-launch, and if I do that the debug app is killed and we are back to square one.

I have found a solution for this, and it is that first you start Chrome manually and then start a dart server from the console/terminal of your editor and take that URL provided in the console/terminal, and paste in Chrome’s search bar. Given that you have already enabled the above mentioned flag, the web app will work just fine and it’s UI will load.

Now, I wanna know if Flutter team is planning on resolving this issue anytime soon? Because it’s tiresome to first start a web server and then paste the URL in Chrome.

My Environment:

Flutter 3.32.4
Dart 3.8.1
Chrome 138.0.7204.49
OS: Ubuntu Linux 24.04

2

Yes, I had the same issue not long ago and it took some time to figure out what was actually causing it. Like you said, everything in the background seems to work fine but the UI just does not load. After some digging, I found out it was because of a recent Chrome update that disables the automatic fallback to software WebGL. The only way I got around it was by opening Chrome manually with the right flag already enabled, then starting the Dart server through the terminal and pasting the URL into Chrome. I work at a mobile app development company and a few of our team members also faced this problem, so it seems pretty common. Hopefully the Flutter team releases a proper fix soon because doing this every time really slows down the workflow.