As part of the Kindle Fire, Amazon introduced a new web browser called Silk that uses some of Amazon’s best technologies to help make mobile browsing even better. What is Amazon Silk? Well, from the looks of things, it’s awesome.
Amazon Silk is the Kindle Fire’s new web browser…
Amazon Silk is a web browser optimised for the Amazon Kindle Fire hardware, which runs Android Gingerbread. The main focus of Silk is to take the processing load off of the Kindle Fire CPU/GPU.
…that taps into Amazon’s EC2 cloud to handle heavy processing…
Silk is referred to as a Split browser. It knows what web processing tasks the tablet can handle well, and which ones it cant. The lighter processing will be handled by the tablet hardware, while the heavier code crunching (HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc) will be sent to Amazon’s cloud servers which have more muscle in the areas of RAM and CPU power.
…speed up page load times…
Loading a single website requires initiating multiple connections to multiple servers. For less powerful devices, this process takes more time than it would for a more powerful machine. Better equipped to handle this process with its powerful optical network, the EC2 backend will take websites and optimise them for the Kindle Fire’s screen size/resolution so that the device has an easier time digesting those pages.
…minimise the amount of storage used on your Kindle Fire…
Optimised pages means smaller file sizes. But Silk will also cache sites you’ve visited on the EC2 servers, thus keeping more of your storage free for cooler shit.
…and will pre-load the all the pages you visit the most.
Visit Gizmodo multiple times a day? Or maybe you prefer the more intellectual musings of Hipster Runoff? Either way, Silk will learn your browsing behaviour and pre-load the pages you visit the most when an internet connection is present. I don’t know about you, but this sounds like the future of mobile browsing.