

Amazon Silk web browser adds new twist to old idea - bbgm
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-adds-new-twist-to-old-idea.ars

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droithomme
As an engineer, I find myself intrigued and amazed by the design.

As a skeptic and privacy advocate, I see that this elegantly provides an
unassailable technical justification for amazon to monitor, log and analyze
100% of all web activity that each customer engages in, developing fascinating
behavioral and interest profiles on them. At least it can be disabled, for
now.

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luigi
Two major points: (1) It uses a single SPDY connection to the Amazon cloud.
(2) It compiles JS down to ARM machine code.

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iam
I'd like to see some evidence that transmitting ARM binary code of JS is
faster than transmitting the original JS and then JITting it to ARM. The
binary alone will be a magnitude larger at least than the original source.

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ZeroGravitas
Even if it's bigger over the wire, they might still save on total rendering
time and/or battery life.

They seem to be suggesting that these optimisations are intelligent and vary
with circumstances, so they don't have to work every time as long as they can
predict when the right time to turn them on is.

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snorkel
Opera uses a similar approach for their Opera Mini mobile browser: the client
is very thin and relies on Opera's own transcoding proxy to provide partially
rendered content to the client. The problem of Opera Mini is it does not
support true end-to-end encryption because the Opera proxy has to digest the
content. I wonder if Silk has the same issue.

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jarek
The rendering server is pretty much the definition of the man in the middle. I
don't see how Silk could not have the same issue.

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ctdonath
How much "Silk" load can Amazon handle without charging?

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Qz
All of it. Right now it's only for Kindle Fire, and that device is primarily
there just to sell the rest of their digital content.

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Hisoka
How is this faster if Amazon is acting like a proxy and acting another layer
of redirection?

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r00fus
By trimming all HTTP resource requests down to one SPDY request that hits a
massive cached source on AWS, I can imagine it might be considerably faster.

