Early in the web support phase, I added support for directly testing in a chrome browser for a simulated test environment. This may have proved useful in helping the web bootstrap, but long-term it does not present a very compelling test environment. Since it doesn't actually perform rendering/painting it only really tests the interface between the engine and framework. Compared to actual integration tests on real browsers, it is of limited use for ensuring correctness. In addition, these tests are highly flaky on CI due to in part to the orchestration complexity.

Unfortunately it also adds a lot of dependencies to the flutter tool. This was acceptable since we needed them anyway for flutter run. When we move to the frontend_server, many of these dependencies are no longer needed though. Notably, the build_runner dependency is one of two transitive mirrors dependencies that prevents an AOT built tool

I propose that in the short-term, we remove support for flutter test --platform=chrome from the tool into a special purpose command in dev/bots/. This would still be usable for the framework CI, but would no longer be accessible for the tool.

@nturgut @yjbanov @zanderso

EDIT:

@yjbanov @Piinks, are there any implications for web goldens?

@mehmetf @chingjun, is this code used in google3 at all?