Amazon's Silk Browser Uses Google's Own Technologies Against It

Amazon's Silk browser, for the upcoming Kindle Fire uses a lot of tricks and cutting edge technologies to make the web as fast or even faster on the Kindle Fire tablet as with a regular desktop browser.

Amazon has its vast and powerful Elastic Cloud Computing infrastructure to and its connections to all the major ISPs. But, interestingly enough, it's using some of Google's own technologies as well to speed up the web.

And it's not the fact that the Kindle Fire is running a customized Android underneath, the Amazon Silk browser is based on the WebKit rendering engine, to which Google contributes quite a lot, since it uses it in Chrome as well as on its Android browser, but also SPDY, an alternative, or supplement to HTTP, that Google helped develop and is actively promoting.

SPDY, short for "speedy" was developed by Google as a way of augmenting the regular HTTP protocol. It uses compression and several methods of optimizing and even predicting requests so resources are sent faster from the server to the browser.

Amazon Silk uses SPDY for its connection to the EC2 cloud. Google also uses it in Chrome for all connections to Google sites. SPDY is an open protocol, so anyone is free to use it and Google is encouraging websites to adopt it.

That being said, it probably didn't think it would end up being used in an Android tablet that ditches most Google apps and services, for a browser that helps Amazon build a much better picture of what users are doing online than what Google, for all its might, would ever hope to achieve.

Unless of course, it starts using its own cloud to speed up Google Chrome or the mobile browsers. Don't think that someone, somewhere at the Googleplex hasn't thought about it already.