Amazon Kindle Fire Release: Silk Web Browser to Impress Users With Speed (VIDEO)
Amazon, at its New York City press conference today, revealed its Amazon Silk web browser for the Kindle Fire.
This latest piece of software from Amazon is meant to give users of the Kindle Fire device a faster Internet interface.
Amazon Silk is operated between the Kindle Fire tablet and Amazon’s own EC2 servers. The web browser will feature accelerated browsing through a combination of caching, compressing and compatible technologies.
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When users request a certain webpage in the browser, Amazon's cloud servers will handle the rest. The server side will proceed to load the webpage and download the content pertaining to the user's request. Once this is finished, Amazon Silk will send an all encompassing webpage back featuring its HTML, JavaSript, CSS, and images.
The web browser's multimedia optimization, for example, can compress a 3MB photo file to 50KB before being sent to the Kindle Fire.
An Amazon engineer recently said that the split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine code on the server side in situations where it will provide a speed boost. The engineer also went on to state that Amazon will track whether users prefer the full or mobile versions of various websites so that they can predict which one is better to send to users. The split browsing mode can also be disabled and users can choose to use Silk as a normal web browser instead.
Amazon has said that collected usage data is anonymous and stored in aggregate, thus protecting user privacy. The company added that Amazon Silk would still be in operation if the EC2 servers were to ever go down. The sub-systems will run in a "decentralized view" and at a slower pace, but users will have access to the Internet nonetheless.
Mobile web browsing will now be gracing Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet with Silk's noteworthy features.
