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Amazon introduces Silk: a cloud-based browser

Amazon introduces Silk: a cloud-based browser

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Silk also aggregates the motion of other users in order to predict your next move, helping it pre-load whatever you might click on next.

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Amazon Silk browser
Amazon Silk 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" 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 own handshake and therefore the latency begins to stack up. With Silk you can just have the latency of connecting to Amazon once, and then the EC2 servers can make all the other connections over their optical bandwidth. In addition to channeling and optimizing content for the Kindle Fire’s screen, Silk also aggregates the motion of other users in order to predict your next move, helping it pre-load whatever you might click on next. Amazon claims that despite these advances, to the user Silk will feel exactly like a traditional browser, just faster.

Amazon Silk browser for Kindle Fire

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