Amazon's Silk browser for the Kindle Fire
Amazon's entering the browser game with the all-new Silk "cloud-based" browser for the Kindle Fire tablet.
Silk browser on Kindle Fire HD adds faster page loads, Trending Now list
Amid all the excitement about its new Kindle Fire HD devices yesterday, one thing Amazon failed to mention is the new version of its Silk browser installed on the tablets. There are a number of meaningful improvements in the update, like better support for HTML5 web standards and an improved UI, but the biggest difference is speed — "at least a 30 percent reduction in page load latency," according to the company.
Silk is a so-called "split" browser, using Amazon’s servers to compress and...
Hands-on
Amazon Silk browser hands-on
We just got a quick hands-on video with the browser! Amazon also clarified a bit of Silk’s functionality for us. Apparently the device browser loads the HTML while EC2 is sucking in the images, and so once the device is ready to start requesting those images, EC2 has them on offer. Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Amazon introduces Silk: a cloud-based browser
In addition to heavily skinning Android, Amazon is rolling its own web browser for its new Kindle Fire tablet. They’re calling Silk a "split" browser, with half of the work being done by the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud). The idea of a middleman compressing and simplifying websites before they’re sent to a mobile device isn’t new, but Amazon’s approach seems much more advanced, with all the sub-systems of the browser available on both sides, and work being split "dynamically"...
