
Introducing Amazon Silk - sant0sk1
http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing-amazon-silk/
======
moxiemk1
"Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server
fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With each
page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the
mobile hardware and Amazon EC2 (i.e. which browser sub-components run where)
that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity
and the location of any cached content." (from [http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-
Color-Multi-touch-Display-Wi-Fi...](http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Color-Multi-
touch-Display-Wi-
Fi/dp/B0051VVOB2/ref=amb_link_357575542_4?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=gateway-
center-
column&pf_rd_r=0N625M4JAW6DBV6QKRXA&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1321408942&pf_rd_i=507846#silk))

This sounds conceptually similar to how Opera delivers pages with one of its
mobile browsers, which is to say that Javascript and rich web apps will be
severely crippled. Is it indeed possible for the server and client to
collaboratively decide what parts of my code to run client-side and which ones
proxy-side and still have anything approximating good performance/identical
functionality?

~~~
ma2rten
From the video, I got the impression that they might even not be sending html,
css and javascript at all. Instead they might be sending some javascript
bytecode and a binary DOM tree.

~~~
riledhel
That would be really interesting! Any implementations of something like that
working today?

~~~
pornel
OBML: [http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-binary-markup-
langu...](http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-binary-markup-language/)

------
zbowling
So... from the sounds of it... they rebuilt what Opera Mobile does and what
RIM does with Blackberry?

They offload some of the compositing and some of the fetching and asset
flattening server side, and then serve up to the device with custom protocol
the pre-rendered flattened data anything that can be done server side. That is
exactly the same way those other accelerator products already work for mobile.

While it's a nice design, it's been done. The limitations and issues are well
know as well, like having trouble with private intranet sites and VPNs or that
because all the requests come from a few centralized IPs, geoip doesn't offer
any benefit (GEOIP is a hack anyways but sites use it and users get confused
when their pages think they are where ever some colo is). It also creates a
single point of failure which, pedantically, is counter to the design of the
internet.

I was a little inflamed by the video's first statement that browsers have been
built pretty much the same as they were since the beginning without many
innovations. Sounds like marketing spin. I can name several notable amazing
advancements in browser design since the days of WordWideWeb at CERN and
Mosaic. A good number of amazing achievements around security for sure.

Also, on top of that, you know what happens when Silk touches Fire? It's not
pretty.

~~~
icefox
(personal opinion, not opinion of my employeer rim)

The old Blackberry Java browser was split and had tons of logic in the cloud
to compensate for the fact that networks were beyond slow and devices had no
extra cpu and very little ram and it did make a huge difference. It feels like
RIM bet big that networks were always going to be slow and cpu's wouldn't be
that fast and then came along the iphone. These days networks are much faster
and there are cell phone with dual core cpu's and GB's of ram. Just imagine
what we will have next year! So it is all a trade off. Is putting resources
into developing this hybrid browser worth more than developing something else
and just waiting 12 months for faster network/devices?

Also while they don't say it on that page for the curious Amazon silk is using
WebKit (from the jobs page).

~~~
staktrace
Agreed. The most interesting part of the announcement is the mention of
dynamically selecting which components of the browser run on the server and
which run on the client. I wanted to get more details on that but can't find
much. I'm interested in how they carved up WebKit and the interfaces between
the different modules that might get serialized over the air.

~~~
icefox
Well a good chunk of it doubt is all in the Network layer which is outside of
"WebKit". Image compression, dns, fetching, pre-fetching, streaming, etc. You
can no doubt get tons of win just by having a proxy server that gzip's
everything that can be that isn't already. But that is just the tip, they
mentioned image re-compressions, but what other trivial things like stripping
javascript and html to reduce size.

But you could also do things like pre-compile the javascript and only send the
bytecode down to the browser (starting to get in the relm of cool).

And we still haven't touched the dom. Of course the more you touch the harder
it is to keep up to date with webkit.org. The real meat of this entire
discussion has to be what gives the best bang for the buck? For WiFi devices
all of this (guessing) is a waste of resource as my guess is that it doesn't
improve the speed by much. I would expect the performance jumps on a cell
network to be much better. So when is that device coming out?

~~~
staktrace
With the old BlackBerry browser, MDS did image re-compressions using the
Slipstream image libraries, and javascript pre-compilation for the ecma
engine. It helped, but only so much. Reducing image sizes turns out to not be
applicable all that often, unless you're not letting the user zoom in to 1:1
size. Degrading image quality (invisible to the average human eye) helps
though.

If all they're doing is network stuff then there's nothing new here, and I
doubt their gains will be very noticeable. I was hoping for something more
involved.

------
justinph
This sounds like the tips & tricks you see in Pagespeed/Yslow, moving it to a
proxy, coupling it with something like SPDY, and mixing in some server side
caching. Which is neat, and no doubt will achieve some speedups. But I don't
know if it is as revolutionary as Amazon is trying to make it sound.

There are also some serious privacy implications here. I don't really know if
I want Amazon to cache & potentially record all my browsing, especially since
that device is something they can directly connect to all my personal info
(purchasing history, CC number, home address, etc..).

~~~
cshenoy
To be fair, Amazon is doing what our ISPs do already: cache sites to deliver
it faster.

Also, Amazon's privacy statement says you can make Silk a normal browser by
selecting the "off-cloud" mode [1]. Off-cloud mode allows web pages to go
directly to the device rather than pass through their servers. I'm sure most
users won't know of this option but at least it _is_ an option.

[1]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775270)

~~~
mcantelon
They do claim they're going to monitor browsing patterns. More food for their
recommendation engines.

~~~
thebigshane
Source? Was that in the video? I hadn't read that anywhere.

~~~
artursapek
Yes it was,
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u7F_56WhHk&t=3m55s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u7F_56WhHk&t=3m55s)

------
Cherian_Abraham
As more of us rely on our mobile devices to browse the net, and as this trend
picks up, wouldn't this mean that Amazon has a unique vantage point to see
what people are searching for, in terms of content, products etc?

With each product iteration or rollout, it seems like we are increasingly
giving up more than our dollars at the point of sale, like privacy - allowing
companies to have complete access to our browsing/spending preferences.

~~~
smiler
Here's hoping Amazon give you the option to turn it off.

~~~
cshenoy
They do:

"You can also choose to operate Amazon Silk in basic or 'off-cloud' mode. Off-
cloud mode allows web pages generally to go directly to your computer rather
than pass through our servers. As such, it does not take advantage of Amazon’s
cloud computing services to speed-up web content delivery." [1]

[1]
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775270)

~~~
famousactress
Great. _Double_ the compatibility testing.

------
JeffL
Does it seem like Amazon is solving yesterdays problem instead of the futures?
With the speed of CPU's doubling every 18 months and the amount of bandwidth
increasing by 50% annually, the accelerating growth of CPU's and bandwidth
will leave this sort of client-server architecture behind. It's only a matter
of time.

~~~
ceejayoz
If the past is any indicator, increases in CPU and bandwidth will be followed
by increases in CPU and bandwidth _usage_.

~~~
nupark2
To a point; for the vast majority of users, the increase in hardware
requirements for modern desktop tasks plateaued quite some time ago. The
exception to this is video games; they've continued to drive hardware
advancement on the desktop.

Mobile devices are nearly on par with where that plateau began, and there are
plenty of reasons to increase the CPU/GPU performance for the purpose of
games. In this context, it certainly appears to me that Amazon is wasting
their resources on what amounts to a massively complex privacy snafu.

~~~
BobTurbo
The devices are fast enough, but with that speed came massive battery life
problems. Therefore, the same problem exists, its effects have just moved
somewhere else. It is therefore not comparable with the desktop.

------
cleverjake
This seems very similar to Opera Turbo
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Turbo#Opera_Turbo>) - no?

~~~
falcolas
I'd say closer to Opera Mini, which pretty much runs everything through their
proxy service. And I have to admit, it makes for a very compelling browsing
experience on a phone - faster than any other mobile browser out there, with
limited loss of functionality (ajax becomes a normal page turn instead of a
local dom switch).

~~~
dave1010uk
Isn't Opera Mini just a "web" client that always connects through Opera Turbo?
Opera _Mobile_ and Desktop, on the other hand let you switch Turbo on or off.

~~~
andreaso
No, Opera Mini and Opera Turbo works a bit differently. While Turbo provides
compression the actual rendering is always done locally. With Mini on the
other hand the rendering is done server side, and then sent to the Mini client
using an Opera Mini specific markup language.

~~~
dave1010uk
I they were the same so I just Wiresharked Opera Mobile on my phone (with
Turbo enabled) and it looks like you're right. My phone sends HTTP requests to
something.opera-mini.net, then that server sends back compressed HTTP.

You must have a lot of Turbo/Mini proxy servers to handle all the clients. I
guess it's against your TOS but I wonder how easy it would be to proxy another
browser's traffic through Opera Turbo.

Is Opera Mini's format closed or is there a spec somewhere we can see?

Thanks for creating an account to reply.

~~~
andreaso
Fairly certain that there aren't any publicized spec for OBML (aka Opera
Binary Markup Language, aka the Opera Mini markup language).

[http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-web-content-
au...](http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-web-content-authoring-
guidelines/) does contain some good info on Mini, even if it may not be what
you were wondering about.

------
ChuckMcM
This suggests to me an interesting idea. Lets say you used the CSS media tag
to include style sheets for 'e-ink', then if such a style existed you could
'send this to my kindle'. A sort of instapaper meets Kindle Publishing.

Amazon could pull something like that off, it would be useful to have a
wordpress template that included the e-ink stylesheet.

~~~
pornel
There are media queries for monochromatic screens.

<http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/#monochrome>

(although I wouldn't expect them to actually support this properly)

------
qjz
So, a man-in-the-middle attack is a feature when Amazon is the middleman?

~~~
nextparadigms
How "safe" is a browser like this when you want to login to websites? Could
they get your passwords if you log to say Gmail through it?

~~~
qjz
Even if they disable the MITM attack against SSL, or the conventional proxy,
or the caching, the fact that browser internals can be shifted to their
servers means they can get anything they want from your browsing session,
including cookies and keystrokes.

~~~
nextparadigms
Great, so if this thing becomes popular, the Government will be able to verify
all that data and passwords at will, with just one phone call, like it
happened with Wikileaks.

------
ck2
Why would Amazon be on wordpress.com? That's not for real is it?

~~~
tmcw
2nd this: for a big product rollout, this site URL presence & 'blog design' is
so amateurish it feels like a phishing or SEO attack.

~~~
josefresco
The smart people at <http://automattic.com/> might take umbrage with your
classification of their services.

~~~
tmcw
Not really. Automattic does a great job with Wordpress and keeping services
online, no judgment of them.

For a company as large and successful as Amazon to launch a product on a
default blog template under their domain? That's like launching a product on
Blogspot, with that 'circles and dots' theme or whatever: it looks
unprofessional.

------
commanda
I'm not a front end developer, but it seems to me that pre-evaluation of
javascript, or even compiling the js into byte code, would be something that
front end developers would want to try in order to speed up their own users'
experience of their site. Is there anything that the cloud part of Silk is
doing that can be applied to websites in general, regardless of what browser
is doing the rendering? Or is this optimization uniquely possible because
Amazon controls the browser itself?

~~~
joshfraser
there's no good way to compile to JS byte code, but pre-evaluation of JS is
certainly possible and a worthwhile effort

------
johnbender
For those of us working on mobile browsers this means a whole new set of
implementation quirks we have to deal with even without the server side assist
they are including. Even if they choose webkit as the rendering engine god
knows what the event system will behave like.

------
bengl3rt
The best news about this in my opinion is that websites can no longer block
EC2 IPs if they want to work properly on the Kindle Fire... between this and
free inbound bandwidth (now we know why they made that happen in the first
place), scraping just got a lot easier.

------
tryke
The technology looks interesting, but it looks like Amazon gets to track all
web surfing that you do on the Kindle Fire?

------
aforty
This is way more interesting than a rebranded Android tablet.

------
jeffreymcmanus
What is the rendering engine for this? Is it Webkit or something else?

~~~
cshenoy
It's powered by a WebKit engine. Amazon Silk jobs are asking for Webkit
engineers [1]. Presumably, they've modded the underlying Android browser.

[1] <https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/152694/job?in_iframe=1>

~~~
lyso
Interesting that you can use Webkit to build your browser but still call it
"all-new".

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
So you must think there's no difference between Safari and Chrome then.

Rendering engine:browser::Car:engine

~~~
Terretta
One of those pairs seems backwards.

------
kellishaver
It would be really interesting if they could integrate some form of parental
controls along with this whole caching/prefetching/data crunching process.

Say you logged into your Amazon account and set the rating level for content
available in Fire and then Amazon's servers would block your kid from
accessing freepr0n4all.com. You could add exceptions, specific sites to block,
etc. and there would be a known, ever-evolving database of "unsafe" sites by
rating.

The ability to filter content in a mobile browser isn't something that exists
as of yet, I don't believe.

If I could do this, I'd buy one for my 9yr old today.

Of course, this could then be combined with other tools to "lock down" the
fire, e.g. disabling the ability to exit "cloud mode" and thus bypass the
filters, password protection for app/movie purchases, like iOS parental
controls do, and so on.

~~~
Cushman
Honest question from someone who grew up in the era of web content controls:
Do you really think you -- or any of us -- have the technical capability to
stop another person from seeing something on the Internet if they want to?

It makes sense to try to help a young child keep from accidentally stumbling
across that kind of crap, but I'm highly skeptical of the idea that you can
prevent your child from looking at porn full stop-- or would really want to.

~~~
kellishaver
No, not at all. I'm going with (hopefully) good parenting and crossing my
fingers on that one. ;) It's preventing the "accidentally wandering into
questionable content" that I'm interested in, in search results, etc.

I'm not so much even worried about protecting her from the "questionable
content" because I think that's something she needs to learn to deal with
(though we do of course have rules about what is and isn't allowed). I just
don't want her stumbling across it on a tablet in her bedroom, where we won't
notice and can't offer guidance or discussion.

We have a computer in the living room that she uses for internet access and we
don't have any filtering software, etc. on it. It's just out in the open, so
generally supervised.

~~~
Cushman
That's a great answer. I hope I didn't come off as too critical, sounds like
you definitely know what's up.

~~~
kellishaver
Thanks you :) and no, I didn't think you sounded harsh at all.

------
6ren
So it's OnLive for webpages; putting the client-side on the server-side. Well,
half (or a dynamically allocated proportion) anyway.

But compositing dozens of network fetches from the same cloud, centrally
caching the rest, and predictive pre-fetch are big wins. The endless traipsing
back-and-forth is frustrating even on the desktop. These aren't new ideas, but
if Amazon implements them to deliver a better experience, users won't care -
and neither will you. A sad truth for pioneers.

Also gives Amazon a competitive advantage: host _all_ your stuff with us,
users will love you (google's experiments showed that even fraction-of-a-
second latency loses users.)

 _EDIT_ but... amazon.com is one of the slowest websites on the internet for
me, and I'd expect them to be doing all of the above on their own site...

------
colinprince
How does SSL work with this? Wouldn't a lot of certificates get broken?

~~~
johnpaulett
From the FAQ [1]:

    
    
        What about handling secure (https) connections?
        We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com). 
    
        Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site.  Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist.
    
    

[1]:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html//ref=amb...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html//ref=amb_link_357584342_3?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200775440&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-21-0&pf_rd_r=0TVXTAYDDY8QCBJQHQB1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=1321395082&pf_rd_i=B0051VVOB2)

~~~
raganwald
I’d like to hear more about what “facilitate” means.

Is the connection from the device right through EC2 out to the site secure,
even from Amazon?

Or, is the connection from the device to Amazon secure, and the connection
from Amazon to the site secure, but Amazon is acting as a man-in-the-middle?

Or, is the connection from the device to Amazon insecure, Amazon is acting as
a man-in-the-middle, but the connection from Amazon to the site is secure?

I may be having a slow neuron day, but the wording of the FAQ doesn’t seem to
definitively state which of these three cases holds?

~~~
johnpaulett
It sounds like Amazon is a effectively a man-in-the-middle.

Hopefully the device-to-Amazon connection is secured by Amazon, but I can not
find any details.

The privacy implications of all SSL traffic being decrypted on AWS are a bit
scary.

I am guessing the end user will never see broken SSL certificate warnings (as
you would expect in a regular browser), since Amazon can add a "Amazon MITM"
root CA certificate to the browser.

~~~
srdev
If Amazon does, in fact, act as a MITM, then that's a deal-breaker as far as
I'm concerned.

Edit: The more I think about it, the more I think it is likely that they are
just passing along the connection. SSL is designed to prevent MITM attacks.
They would have to provide their own certificate which would cause browser
warnings. They could write their browser to ignore certificate problems for
Amazon certificates, but that strikes me as a pretty gaping hole.

~~~
raganwald
What you say is very true, however when you say that SSL prevents MITM
attacks, you are assuming that “their browser” always lives entirely within
the device.

If their browser has code operating on the device and in the cloud, then their
browser won't generate certificate warnings because there isn’t a man-in-the-
middle between their browser and the site, there’s a man-in-the-middle between
the device in your hands and the site.

It would be insecure against Amazon snooping or modifying the communication,
but still generate the appropriate warnings about bad certificates.

I think the answer is, run “off-cloud” when you want privacy from Amazon.

~~~
srdev
Yes, I hadn't considered that possibility. The picture in my mind was some
sort of hybrid operation where some of the work was offloaded, in which case
you would still have to properly support device-to-site SSL links.

So I guess the issue of privacy still remains up in the air. I was hoping to
be an early adopter of this, but I think I'll wait to see how the SSL via Silk
situation pans out before putting down cash.

------
harrisreynolds
This Silk browser could be the "killer feature" of the Kindle Fire...
something that allows it to really compete in the tablet space. It'll be
interesting to really see how well it works in the real world and what the
form factor of the Fire feels like.

~~~
miles_matthias
I disagree. It is a good step for browsers everywhere, and hopefully will do
more to push other browsers to use split processing, but the Fire will capture
a new market of price-minded consumers who would never pay over twice as much
for an iPad. Like Bezos said, it's all about bringing that level of product to
a lower level price range.

~~~
r00fus
If browsing (and thus all web-apps) are much faster than on the iPad, it will
push the state of the art... security (https) be damned.

~~~
miles_matthias
So to me there's two parts of introducing new technology that every group has
to address: the technical advances and the policy around the new technology
for consumers. Amazon is obviously doing a good job to help the technical side
of it, but so far I think they're failing on the policy. They haven't
mentioned the ability to shut off the split processing or use a different
browser, and the answers to their privacy FAQs on privacy on their website are
totally evasive. I think they're going to find themselves in a world of hurt
if they don't start being more open about their policies, but who knows, it
may end up not mattering to the masses.

------
DanWaterworth
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that ideally this kind of thing
should be done by website owners rather than amazon?

~~~
wmf
Webmasters and developers of server-side software are extremely lazy, so that
just isn't going to happen.

Also, that would require standardization which has a pretty high cost.

~~~
DanWaterworth
But not so lazy that they couldn't install turn-key server software or a proxy
that would do it for them. Much of it wouldn't necessarily require new
standards, it could work using existing technology. For the parts of it that
would require new standards, provided there is a proven reduction in latency,
it seems like the win would more than make up for the expense of making a new
standard.

------
mikemoka
Advantages:

-cheap devices (the fire?) get to see complex websites

-server side webgl?

-server side java applets?

Disadvantages:

-you partially browse the web on Amazon's cloud so Amazon can track your behaviour (and your data)

-your site is part of an internal network that can only be accessed using a vpn from the outside world? bad luck.

-you have to buy a cheap device to see a real pageload speed,considered that you should get your data from amazon anyway

-if the world uses ec2 for browsing its performance will probably suffer

if you have the ipad you can test a lot of similar apps anyway,like puffin or
skyfire,and see if you would like it,I prefer the native browser myself,yet I
know that the infrastructure would be better in theory.

------
pw
A Wordpress blog running a theme from WooThemes. I guess we know we're dealing
directly with the developers (but at least they listened to patio11's advice
;-).

------
mysmysery
I think this may be much more than Operas method. Note that it includes
formatting, layout and display. This makes me think they essentially run a
clone of the browser on ec2 and could literally swap in the completed Dom, and
layout. Or even a a memory diff. Having a persistent connection would also
allow local events (clicks etc) to be sent back to mirror the state as you
interact with the page.

------
smoyer
Hmmm ... if they can reformat a 3MB JPEG to a 50KB JPEG on-the-fly, then they
can also replace the ad that might have been placed on a site by the owner
with one of their choosing. It would be interesting to see if there's a
difference in click-through rates between Silk's user-agent and a traditional
web browser.

~~~
Permit
ISPs have been able to do this for years. It doesn't really happen because the
outrage would be deafening.

------
will_critchlow
SEOmoz have been seeing extreme volatility in EC2 spot pricing - could this
have been related to pre-release testing of Silk?

[http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/09/amazon-ec2-spot-request-
vo...](http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/09/amazon-ec2-spot-request-volatility-
hits-1000hour/)

~~~
zmmmmm
As a kind of side point, I find it kind of interesting that Amazon is putting
the EC2 brand front and center in this. You'd have to think it would be kind
of surprising if they have really built it on exactly the same cloud that they
are renting to 3rd parties - but that's certainly the way they are portraying
it. It seems like they are almost trying to advertise EC2 to geeks as much as
they are the Silk browser.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
I think Amazon.com runs on EC2 as well.

------
pp13
"Computing Power in the Cloud

EC2 servers have massive computational power. On EC2, available CPU, storage,
and available memory can be orders of magnitudes larger than on mobile
devices. Silk uses the power and speed of the EC2 server fleet to retrieve all
of the components of a website simultaneously, and delivers them to Kindle
Fire in a single, fast stream. Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2
helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life."

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2#silk>

What does this mean? "Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to
conserve your Kindle Fire battery life". Are we offloading javascripting
processing to the cloud and returning the results?

If so it will be different than Opera Mini.

~~~
pp13
From ArsTechnica,

"Amazon has also added a few unique twists of its own that will further
improve the user experience. An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event
told us 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. He also told us 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."

------
jread
This seems sort of like CloudFlare built directly into the browser.
Essentially, using EC2 as an http optimizing and caching proxy through which
requests are routed. They might also geo balance traffic to the closest EC2
region.

------
sundar22in
Why do you need a car which goes at 300 KM/hr when you drive at 50 KM/hr all
the time, and don't have any issue with speed?

When it comes to web browsing most of us have very good speed for browsing,
then why do we need to speed up the browsing?

------
naner
Google also has a massive network of distributed servers and a couple
browsers. I wonder if they'll start doing this for the Android browser and
maybe even as an option for faster browsing on Chome.

------
rmason
Most tablet makers would kill to have this much developer interest. I'm
fascinated by Silk and have wasted the better part of the day trying to figure
out exactly what they're doing.

Here's an independent description of Silk behind the scenes:

[http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-
ad...](http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-adds-new-
twist-to-old-idea/)

I am hoping that Amazon gets a developers guide up soon that fills in more of
the gaps. Already on EC2 and I want to start experimenting.

------
adolph
It will be interesting if Amazon decides to port this browser/services combo
to other devices, similar to Kindle software being on lots of platforms.

~~~
HardyLeung
The connectivity between the server and client side of Fire seems to be quite
custom so it is unlikely a simple port. Amazon also mentioned that this is
exclusive to Fire and made no mentioning of plan to expand Fire. If they do
plan to expand Fire to other platforms in the future, I'd bet they mention it
somewhere.

------
zmmmmm
While I think the idea is brilliant - do as much precomputation and rendering
and content consolidation in the cloud as you can - the strange thing to me is
that all this stuff is _really_ mainly a problem for browsing over cell
networks while the Fire itself only supports Wifi. It kind of hints to me that
there _is_ a 3G Fire coming, they just aren't able to release it yet ...

------
JeffL
Does it seem like Amazon is solving yesterdays problem instead of futures?
With the speed of CPU's doubling every 18 months and the amount of bandwidth
increasing by 50% annually, the accelerating growth of CPU's and bandwidth
will leave this sort of client-server architecture behind. It's only a matter
of time.

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smackfu
Around the 3:00 mark, they start talking about interesting things, like
reducing the number of network requests.

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niyazpk
Here is a screenshot from 1:58 in the video: <http://i.imgur.com/jcVOT.png>

(If this is any indicator of the actual product), it says that the whole
JavaScript processing will be done on the server.

~~~
jannes
No, it is dynamic. In the video these sliders are actually moving. (And not
static, as your image would suggest)

The article explains it like this:

    
    
      All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well
      as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page,
      Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will
      run locally and which will execute remotely.

------
rmccue
I wonder, in terms of having many connections, could the same thing be done by
a HTTP -> SPDY gateway? It saves having a multitude of connections for a
single request, and also is more compressed.

~~~
ctcherry
I think that is exactly what the Silk cloud is doing:
<http://aws.amazon.com/amazonsilk-jobs/>

~~~
rmccue
Aha! That's awesome. Apart from that, it seems like it's normal optimisation
techniques (compressing/resizing images, etc).

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dmix
Wouldn't the amazon silk team post on an Amazon blog?

~~~
acangiano
I don't think so. Amazon has a habit of using third party services for their
blogs. This particular team may just have opted for WordPress.com, instead of
TypePad, like they usually do (see <http://aws.typepad.com>).

~~~
dmix
Ah, right. That at least looks Amazon-y.

They could of put some effort into the logo and blog template into the new
blog. It looks very blog spammy at first.

~~~
acangiano
Agreed. Maybe the Silk team should read my book. :-P

------
castewart
Does anyone have a link to the discussion about Amazon doing more tech-related
disruption than Google?

------
tomlin
The Age of The Terminal, Year One

~~~
nooneelse
Shouldn't you say The Second Age of The Terminal, Year One?

~~~
tomlin
You're right. Maybe this time it'll stick? :D

------
suyash
How good is HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript support?

------
mcantelon
SSL MITM FTW.

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dfc
I can not believe he used the word "decentralized" to describe silk in the
video explanation.

~~~
budgi3
why?

~~~
dfc
Why? Because the Amazon and specifically the AUC lies at the center of the
whole architecture.

------
powerfulninja
"Our back end has some of the fattest pipes you'll find" - Amazon

------
shareme
I am wondering could it internally be webkit node.js/webwokrer combo?

------
mvkel
Don't do your banking on it!

~~~
VonLipwig
This is what I was thinking, surely privacy becomes an issue if all of your
data is going through what is essentially a 3rd party. Maybe secure
connections bypass EC2?

