14 DAY TRIAL // With so many rumors about Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet, it didn't seem like there was much for the company left to unveil at its Kindle event. Yet it still managed to surprise, on the one hand with the aggressive pricing, but also with a brand new browser it developed exclusively for the Kindle Fire.
Dubbed Amazon Silk, it's a very interesting piece of technology, akin to Opera Mini, in that it renders part of any web page in the cloud, on Amazon's massive EC2 infrastructure, to deliver a slimmed down version of the site to the tablet.
This results in lower bandwidth consumption, faster loading and, generally, a significantly improved experience.
"Kindle Fire introduces a revolutionary new web browser called Amazon Silk," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO.
"We refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack and now push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud," he said.
"When you use Silk - without thinking about it or doing anything explicit - you're calling on the raw computational horsepower of Amazon EC2 to accelerate your web browsing," he added.
Amazon has put a lot of effort into Silk. The browser splits the task of getting and rendering a page and its assets between the device and the cloud.
And Amazon's EC2 has plenty of tricks up its sleeve to make browsing faster. For one, with huge computational power at its disposal, any page is rendered instantly.
But it's more than just raw speed, Amazon also has peering with many major ISPs, meaning that it can get to any website a lot faster than your browser would.
What's more, it connects to all of the domains that are regularly accessed by web pages, brings the data together, and then sends the tablet everything it needs in a single stream.
But this is just half the picture. The Kindle Fire maintains a permanent connection to EC2 so there is no lag associated with establishing TCP connections. At the same time, EC2 keeps an open connection to all of the major websites in the world, for the same reason.
And there's even more, Amazon also uses a prediction algorithm which, based on what people browse every day, knows with a high degree of certainty what you're going to click next on any page and preemptive loads that next page and sends it to the Kindle Fire.
While Opera Mini has a similar approach, pages are rendered in the cloud and then sent to devices, Amazon Silk promises an unaltered experience, meaning web pages look and feel exactly how their creators wanted.
Amazon Silk is nothing less than revolutionary, it promises the be fastest browser, on tablets desktop and anything in between, by a significant margin.
And it promises to make browsing a great experience on the Amazon tablet. Considering that the Kindle Fire's main touting point is not web browsing, bur rather all of the content you can access with it, Silk is a great addition to what is already a wonderful device.