Along with new hardware, Amazon also pushed a new version of the Silk browser that powers the Kindle Fire. The updated version is faster and more intuitive and the UI revamp should make it easier to manage most visited sites, bookmarks and history.
However, there's one completely new feature in the latest Silk version, a Trending Now section, below the Most Visited one on the start page.
"'Trending Now'... alerts our customers to pages that have experienced an unusual increase in their level of traffic, usually a good indicator that the page or topic may be particularly noteworthy right now," Amazon
explains.
That could prove useful, even more so since Amazon is not doing much guessing when it comes to what's is popular at any given time.
It's actually looking at the pages that are seeing the biggest surge in traffic at that very moment from the people that are browsing the web with their Kindle Fires.
A second new feature, "Selected Sites" which recommends sites that you may find useful is likely built on the same algorithm.
"We also offer 'Selected Sites' (shelf three in the new tab view) a selection of up and coming or otherwise noteworthy sites that our customers might find interesting," Amazon added.
All of this is aggregated data and there's no real privacy issues; if tens of thousands of people are visiting a site it's not really private, but it could make some people uneasy. Then again, those people wouldn't be using a browser that funnels all of their traffic through Amazon's servers.
One problem is that they don't really have a choice, they either use Silk or don't browse the web, one of the big functions of any tablet. Thankfully, the cloud connection can be turned off enabling users to browse the web like they normally would.
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