@yjbanov I made this change to make sure we always reset it to the correct default (it looks like at some point things got out of sync).

If it's not too much trouble, can you please move the browserEngine == BrowserEngine.blink into a constant with a TODO and a Github issue, something like this:

// TODO(yjbanov): $LINK_TO_GITHUB_ISSUE
// Frequently when a browser launches an API that other browsers already support
// there are subtle incompatibilities that may cause apps to crash if we blindly
// adopt the new implementation. This variable prevents us from picking up potentially
// incompatible implementations of ImagdeDecoder API. Instead, when a new browser
// engine launches the API, we'll evaluate it and enable it explicitly.
final bool _kProtectFromImageDecoderIncompatibilities = browserEngine == BrowserEngine.blink;

I think it would be nice if we differentiated between _browserImageDecodingEnabled explicitly being set and defaulting to true. That way, if it is explicitly set, it can override the browserEngine == BrowserEngine.blink, so that it is easy to test against browsers that have implemented the ImageDecoder API.

@eyebrowsoffire are you talking about overriding for tests or apps?

In tests, we already do override it e.g:

As for apps, do we really want users to play with this? Whoever wants to test this in different browsers likely already knows how to modify and build the engine, so they can just change the boolean value in the code.

I meant in apps. If we wanted to test the viability of this in a browser, I'd much rather just be able to pass in a flag and try out a bunch of different apps than to rebuild the engine entirely. If a user stumbles upon the flag and misuses it, it's not the end of the world IMO. Let's just document this as well as we can, and if a user files a bug saying "I turned this flag on and it doesn't work" then we just say "don't do that" and close the bug and move on.

Sure, adding an ability to force a specific mode when building using the Flutter Tool SGTM. If we add such a thing, consider adding it somewhere in the configuration.dart file, so we don't have options like that scattered across the codebase.

I would instead explain that in Chromium we use ImageDecoder instead of the wasm codecs.

Can you please file an issue to remove this as well? We can implement this by piping the image through a 2D canvas.

Complete nitpick, but I don't like the name of this variable. On its face, the name seems to imply the opposite of what it does. If something called ProtectFromImageDecoderIncompatibilities is true, I would think that means that you are protecting from incompatibilities, and if it's false, I would think you would not be protecting from incompatibilities. In general, either way, the name is a bit confusing as a name of a boolean. Might I suggest something like _kImageDecoderIsStable or _kImageDecoderIsBlessed or something like that?

Agreed. I also removed the k prefix since these are getters and not consts anymore.