

Quick Amazon Silk thoughts - wspruijt
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2011/09/quick_amazon_si.html

======
spjwebster
Sadly it looks like PPK was in too much of a hurry to post some 'quick
thoughts'. A little bit of additional reading (heck, even watching the video
on the Silk blog) would have revealed that Silk's "split architecture" is
much, much smarter than simply having the server send a bitmap of the page to
the browser.

From the introductory blog post [1]:

> _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._

Then there's the Ars article [2] that explains some of what Silk's split
architecture can do:

> _Amazon will load the webpage on the server side, downloading all of the
> necessary content elements in parallel. After downloading the content,
> Amazon will send the compiled page—including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and
> images—back to the device as a single stream of data… The Silk browser
> maintains a single persistent connection to Amazon's cloud (using Google's
> fast SPDY protocol), through which requests are sent and content is
> received… 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._

And the Terms & Conditions [3] make it clear that Silk can stand on its own
two feet if desired:

> _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._

When they say "split architecture", it sounds like they really mean it.

[1]: [http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing-
amazo...](http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing-amazon-silk/)

[2]: [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/amazons-silk-
web...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-
adds-new-twist-to-old-idea.ars)

[3]:
[http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775270)

------
philbarr
"..Android WebKit, the most disappointing mobile browser right now..."

Android is great but this line is unfortunately SO true. It's especially
noticable on a tablet.

I tried Dolphin instead and it's awesome. One feature I particularly like is
that you can change the User-Agent header between Desktop/Ipad/Android. Now I
don't have to rely on websites to determine what content I get, I can decide
for myself thank-you-very-much. This should be a standard feature in all
browsers.

~~~
nodata
> Now I don't have to rely on websites to determine what content I get

Do you expect normal users to switch user agents so that a website will work
for them?

~~~
philbarr
If they knew the benefits of doing that, they'd learn. My wife did when I
showed her. Now she knows what to do when she sees a website and thinks,
"that's not what it looks like on my laptop".

~~~
nodata
So instead of a website being fixed every user should learn how to switch user
agents to work around it?

------
apgwoz
> _Silk seems to be an Opera Mini-like proxy browser, where the client asks
> the server to fetch and render the page, and then receives what’s basically
> a bitmap image. This makes for very fast browsing and little data traffic._

I doubt it's basically a bitmap image, because you lose the ability to
highlight the text. My guess is that they'll essentially rewrite the markup,
css, resize/recompress images and deliver it all in a single compressed stream
that can be decompressed and laid out with something akin to absolute
positioning.

It could even be that the assets are encoded inline using data uris, but that
seems like a stretch.

