As Amazon announced their new tablets they also mentioned a new browser they had built – Amazon Silk. Silk promises to be the fastest browser ever, especially on a mobile device, because it uses Amazon’s cloud services to do a lot of the backend computing. In other words, your little tablet won’t have to do a lot of requests over the network and then work some computationally (sort of) difficult stuff to render web pages as you browse using Silk.
It’s an interesting idea, and one that is described pretty well in this video by Amazon:
Amazon Silk Video
What Silk Means
So why is Amazon, a company that now sells devices, trying to make the workload on your device less? I mean, shouldn’t they want to follow Apple’s iCloud strategy and push the compute to the device so people feel like they need to buy a new one every year as it gets slower and slower?? Why pay all that money for compute costs in the cloud (OK, it’s not that expensive for Amazon since they own the cloud, but still, it’s not free)?
DATA
I was going to spend the time writing up how brilliant this was – but Chris Espinosa has already written it better than I ever could; check out his post on the topic:
The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.
It’s awesome. And for sure worth the expense.
Now they just have to get people using the browser! I’m excited to try it out…
Finally, a funny:
Check out the recommended videos alongside the Amazon Silk Video
If I thought Google was smarter I’d think they’d put there there on purpose!



The article takes a pretty negative tone toward Microsoft. The comments seem to indicate that people think Techcrunch is continuing it’s Google and Apple lovefest and is attacking Microsoft because of this bias.
I’m very pleased to announce that OfficeDrop has launched our first app in the new Mac App Store.