The Verge - Amazon's Silk browser for the Kindle Fire

Silk browser on Kindle Fire HD adds faster page loads, Trending Now list

2012-09-07T18:55:03Z

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 simplify websites before they’re served to the user. While it speeds up the browsing experience, it also means Amazon can see anonymized data about the pages its users are accessing. As pointed out by TechCrunch, the updated version of Silk adds a...

Amazon Silk browser hands-on

2011-09-29T21:26:55Z

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

2011-09-28T13:39:00Z

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" between the device and the cloud based on the URL at hand. One of the big problems for mobile browsing, according to Amazon, is latency: an average page is made from bunches of different files served from all sorts of domains, each of which need their...