What is Amazon Silk
The much celebrated and acclaimed feature with any Kindle Fire review is the Amazon Silk browser. This is a new browser that brings a whole new approach to the way we browse internet from a mobile device based on “split browser” architecture that enhance the speed of the mobile device hardware by using the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud. It is available exclusively on Amazon Kindle Fire.
Normally, because of the compact size of mobile devices we don’t get the hardware standard of PC and laptop. This has an impact on the efficiency of mobile devices, and it is especially true when it comes to browsing the internet.
How does Amazon Silk browser work
The Silk browser software is present both on Kindle Fire and on the Amazon Elastic Compute cloud (Amazon EC2) which is a central part of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Whenever a page request take place, the Silk browser software from Kindle Fire will connect to its sub-components on Amazon EC2 to determine network conditions, page complexity and cached content etc. for a much faster browsing experience.
Amazon EC2 has massive computational powers with massive server fleet and access to thousands of applications with solid infrastructure and platform. Amazon Silk browser uses the power of the EC2 severs fleet to retrieve all the machinery of a website and deliver them to Kindle Fire in a fraction of seconds.
Unlike traditional browsers, Amazon Silk browser doesn’t wait to receive the HTML file to begin downloading the other page assets. Silk will automatically pushed content that it knows is associated with the page to the Kindle Fire even before intimating with the site. The ability to learn these page characteristics automatically comes as a result of millions of page loads and maintaining this knowledge on EC2, like the cache of our PC or laptop.
Modern websites are complex and takes time to load. It requires a lot of computational power for fast streaming. At times it needs to send requests to a dozen or more different servers to build one web page. With Amazon Silk browser, it simple tap into Amazon Cloud.
User experience with Amazon Silk browser
Amazon Silk delivers a much faster and more efficient web browsing experience on the Kindle Fire. Cloud-based browser is not a new concept and Opera Mini has been offering similar experiences for years for mobile users. You can find similar experiences with iPad and Android tablets.
But there is a massive advantage with Amazon Silk – Amazon Web Services was established in March 2006 and are used by hundreds of thousands of enterprise, government, and startup customers in more than 190 countries. This means no one else is in a better position than Amazon to get content delivered faster for that web content residing on Amazon’s cloud servers.
