Introducing Amazon Silk

http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing-amazon-silk/

by sant0sk1 • 15 years ago

430 176 15 years ago

amazonsilk.wordpress.com

adolph• 15 years ago

It will be interesting if Amazon decides to port this browser/services combo to other devices, similar to Kindle software being on lots of platforms.

HardyLeung• 15 years ago

The connectivity between the server and client side of Fire seems to be quite custom so it is unlikely a simple port. Amazon also mentioned that this is exclusive to Fire and made no mentioning of plan to expand Fire. If they do plan to expand Fire to other platforms in the future, I'd bet they mention it somewhere.

cleverjake3• 15 years ago

This seems very similar to Opera Turbo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Turbo#Opera_Turbo) - no?

falcolas• 15 years ago

I'd say closer to Opera Mini, which pretty much runs everything through their proxy service. And I have to admit, it makes for a very compelling browsing experience on a phone - faster than any other mobile browser out there, with limited loss of functionality (ajax becomes a normal page turn instead of a local dom switch).

dave1010uk2• 15 years ago

Isn't Opera Mini just a "web" client that always connects through Opera Turbo? Opera Mobile and Desktop, on the other hand let you switch Turbo on or off.

moxiemk12• 15 years ago

"Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With each page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the mobile hardware and Amazon EC2 (i.e. which browser sub-components run where) that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content." (from http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Color-Multi-touch-Display-Wi-Fi...)

This sounds conceptually similar to how Opera delivers pages with one of its mobile browsers, which is to say that Javascript and rich web apps will be severely crippled. Is it indeed possible for the server and client to collaboratively decide what parts of my code to run client-side and which ones proxy-side and still have anything approximating good performance/identical functionality?

cleverjake3• 15 years ago

I dont think there was any indication of javascript changes. At least all they mentioned was image and dns optimization, as well as prefetching and caching.

sparky• 15 years ago

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/09/amazon...

Now, the picture could be incorrect or stretching the truth, but there was some indication.

moxiemk12• 15 years ago

On the page I link to, Amazon says "We've refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack to push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud. This lets Silk do more work, more quickly, and all at once. We call this “split browser” architecture."

Computation (in the context of webpages) indicates JS to me, though they concievably could mean DOM construction. I'm fairly skeptical that transmitting a serialized DOM and unpacking it could be more efficient over mobile network connections that is using our time-honored DOM serialization, HTML.

I do hope I'm wrong, as I can't see how this sort of proxy can be healthy for the web, but I don't think my speculations are out if the realm of reasonable given the information.

lojack• 15 years ago

Conceptually its almost identical to Opera Mini. Amazon, however, gets to take advantage of their massive infrastructure.

azakai• 15 years ago

> Conceptually its almost identical to Opera Mini. Amazon, however, gets to take advantage of their massive infrastructure.

Perhaps Opera Mini runs on Amazon EC2, which would mean they use the same infrastructure ;)

pp133• 15 years ago

We don't have much information on Amazon Silk. It be interesting to know how it works in depth and how web apps will be affected.

tnorthcutt• 15 years ago

*affected

ma2rten• 15 years ago

From the video, I got the impression that they might even not be sending html, css and javascript at all. Instead they might be sending some javascript bytecode and a binary DOM tree.

riledhel• 15 years ago

That would be really interesting! Any implementations of something like that working today?

adamsmith• 15 years ago

I wonder if they'll use non-TCP connections on 3G. That'd be cool. (http://blog.davidsingleton.org/mobiletcp)

joeshaw• 15 years ago

Based on their jobs page (http://aws.amazon.com/amazonsilk-jobs/) it looks like they're using SPDY.

erikpukinskis• 15 years ago

The video explicitly states that the browser+ec2 work together to decide how to divide up the work based on network conditions, page complexity and other factors.

I would assume that to mean that if there's Javascript that can't be run on the server side, it will be run on the client.

pmr_• 15 years ago

The mind bogging part is that this should still be faster than just rendering the damn page and executing the JS.

Cherian_Abraham• 15 years ago

As more of us rely on our mobile devices to browse the net, and as this trend picks up, wouldn't this mean that Amazon has a unique vantage point to see what people are searching for, in terms of content, products etc?

With each product iteration or rollout, it seems like we are increasingly giving up more than our dollars at the point of sale, like privacy - allowing companies to have complete access to our browsing/spending preferences.

smiler• 15 years ago

Here's hoping Amazon give you the option to turn it off.

cshenoy3• 15 years ago

They do:

"You can also choose to operate Amazon Silk in basic or 'off-cloud' mode. Off-cloud mode allows web pages generally to go directly to your computer rather than pass through our servers. As such, it does not take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing services to speed-up web content delivery." [1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...

smackfu• 15 years ago

Around the 3:00 mark, they start talking about interesting things, like reducing the number of network requests.

dmix2• 15 years ago

Wouldn't the amazon silk team post on an Amazon blog?

acangiano2• 15 years ago

I don't think so. Amazon has a habit of using third party services for their blogs. This particular team may just have opted for WordPress.com, instead of TypePad, like they usually do (see http://aws.typepad.com).

dmix2• 15 years ago

Ah, right. That at least looks Amazon-y.

They could of put some effort into the logo and blog template into the new blog. It looks very blog spammy at first.

cobrabyte• 15 years ago

Google picks up updates to sites hosted on Wordpress.com usually within minutes. Amazon registered the sub-domain that would pull the most weight for the keyword term 'amazon silk.'

It's amazing how quick Google picks up changes to Wordpress.com blogs.

So, it's just an SEM thing. They'll probably have a post to the official channel soon.

Maxious• 15 years ago

> It's amazing how quick Google picks up changes to Wordpress.com blogs.

Via PubSubHubBub, right? http://mashable.com/2010/03/03/wordpress-pubsubhubbub/

pw• 15 years ago

A Wordpress blog running a theme from WooThemes. I guess we know we're dealing directly with the developers (but at least they listened to patio11's advice ;-).

justinph• 15 years ago

This sounds like the tips & tricks you see in Pagespeed/Yslow, moving it to a proxy, coupling it with something like SPDY, and mixing in some server side caching. Which is neat, and no doubt will achieve some speedups. But I don't know if it is as revolutionary as Amazon is trying to make it sound.

There are also some serious privacy implications here. I don't really know if I want Amazon to cache & potentially record all my browsing, especially since that device is something they can directly connect to all my personal info (purchasing history, CC number, home address, etc..).

cshenoy3• 15 years ago

To be fair, Amazon is doing what our ISPs do already: cache sites to deliver it faster.

Also, Amazon's privacy statement says you can make Silk a normal browser by selecting the "off-cloud" mode [1]. Off-cloud mode allows web pages to go directly to the device rather than pass through their servers. I'm sure most users won't know of this option but at least it is an option.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...

mcantelon3• 15 years ago

They do claim they're going to monitor browsing patterns. More food for their recommendation engines.

castewart• 15 years ago

Does anyone have a link to the discussion about Amazon doing more tech-related disruption than Google?

tryke• 15 years ago

The technology looks interesting, but it looks like Amazon gets to track all web surfing that you do on the Kindle Fire?

pp133• 15 years ago

"Computing Power in the Cloud

EC2 servers have massive computational power. On EC2, available CPU, storage, and available memory can be orders of magnitudes larger than on mobile devices. Silk uses the power and speed of the EC2 server fleet to retrieve all of the components of a website simultaneously, and delivers them to Kindle Fire in a single, fast stream. Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2#silk

What does this mean? "Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life". Are we offloading javascripting processing to the cloud and returning the results?

If so it will be different than Opera Mini.

pp133• 15 years ago

From ArsTechnica,

"Amazon has also added a few unique twists of its own that will further improve the user experience. An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event told us that the split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine code on the server side in situations where it will provide a speed boost. He also told us that Amazon will track whether users prefer the full or mobile versions of various websites so that they can predict which one is better to send to users."

harrisreynolds• 15 years ago

This Silk browser could be the "killer feature" of the Kindle Fire... something that allows it to really compete in the tablet space. It'll be interesting to really see how well it works in the real world and what the form factor of the Fire feels like.

guyht• 15 years ago

I agree with this. Imo, this is a good step for web browsers.

antimarketing• 15 years ago

This is a temporary move, when 4G becomes widely available in a couple of years or even six months from now, in some countries web optimization via cloud computing will become a trivial.

miles_matthias2• 15 years ago

I disagree. It is a good step for browsers everywhere, and hopefully will do more to push other browsers to use split processing, but the Fire will capture a new market of price-minded consumers who would never pay over twice as much for an iPad. Like Bezos said, it's all about bringing that level of product to a lower level price range.

r00fus• 15 years ago

If browsing (and thus all web-apps) are much faster than on the iPad, it will push the state of the art... security (https) be damned.

colinprince• 15 years ago

How does SSL work with this? Wouldn't a lot of certificates get broken?

mildweed• 15 years ago

the SSL would have to stop in the EC2 instance where the bulk of the 'browser' is. Its then up to the Silk infrastructure to ensure the transmissions from the Fire to EC2 would be secure as well.

thepumpkin1979• 15 years ago

Sounds like a "secure" man-in-the-middle "hack"...?

mike-cardwell2• 15 years ago

Opera Turbo is a similar service to this, but it doesn't intercept https connections. Hopefully Amazon's service will behave the same way. If not, there will be a privacy shit storm.

johnpaulett2• 15 years ago

From the FAQ [1]:

    What about handling secure (https) connections?
    We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com). 

    Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site.  Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html//ref=amb...

raganwald2• 15 years ago

I’d like to hear more about what “facilitate” means.

Is the connection from the device right through EC2 out to the site secure, even from Amazon?

Or, is the connection from the device to Amazon secure, and the connection from Amazon to the site secure, but Amazon is acting as a man-in-the-middle?

Or, is the connection from the device to Amazon insecure, Amazon is acting as a man-in-the-middle, but the connection from Amazon to the site is secure?

I may be having a slow neuron day, but the wording of the FAQ doesn’t seem to definitively state which of these three cases holds?

mike-cardwell2• 15 years ago

"We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com)."

So they are MITM'ing HTTPS connections.

"Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist."

So they aren't MITM'ing HTTPS connections.

What the hell? Which is it?

powerfulninja• 15 years ago

"Our back end has some of the fattest pipes you'll find" - Amazon

jeffreymcmanus2• 15 years ago

What is the rendering engine for this? Is it Webkit or something else?

hellweaver666• 15 years ago

If it's anything but Webkit, I won't be testing my sites in it unless they manage to get decent penetration.

Until it outranks IE6 in my stats, I won't even be giving it a look in.

cshenoy3• 15 years ago

It's powered by a WebKit engine. Amazon Silk jobs are asking for Webkit engineers [1]. Presumably, they've modded the underlying Android browser.

[1] https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/152694/job?in_iframe=1

lyso• 15 years ago

Interesting that you can use Webkit to build your browser but still call it "all-new".

mvkel• 15 years ago

Don't do your banking on it!

VonLipwig• 15 years ago

This is what I was thinking, surely privacy becomes an issue if all of your data is going through what is essentially a 3rd party. Maybe secure connections bypass EC2?

ck22• 15 years ago

Why would Amazon be on wordpress.com? That's not for real is it?

vitobcn• 15 years ago

It is. It redirects to wordpress from http://www.amazon.com/silk

josefresco2• 15 years ago

Amazon is on probably on WordPress because a lot of other high profile/high traffic blogs are hosted there as well.

ck22• 15 years ago

Except Amazon's CDN and hosting resources dwarfs wordpress.com

I mean they aren't even using an amazon subdomain or their own domain - it all looks like an afterthought someone had this week "oh yeah we should have a blog, where can I set one up in a few minutes".

tmcw2• 15 years ago

2nd this: for a big product rollout, this site URL presence & 'blog design' is so amateurish it feels like a phishing or SEO attack.

josefresco2• 15 years ago

The smart people at http://automattic.com/ might take umbrage with your classification of their services.

lean• 15 years ago

Agreed, at first I just chalked it up to this be a "rogue" blog by some members of the team, but this page is the only "official" page I can find on the product. The favicon is even Wordpress...

Edit: this is a more branded description: [Amazon Help](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html//ref=amb...). No video though.

taylorbuley2• 15 years ago

AWS blog is on Typepad, so I'd say this is a step up for their publishing efforts

http://aws.typepad.com/

johnbender• 15 years ago

For those of us working on mobile browsers this means a whole new set of implementation quirks we have to deal with even without the server side assist they are including. Even if they choose webkit as the rendering engine god knows what the event system will behave like.

zbowling2• 15 years ago

So... from the sounds of it... they rebuilt what Opera Mobile does and what RIM does with Blackberry?

They offload some of the compositing and some of the fetching and asset flattening server side, and then serve up to the device with custom protocol the pre-rendered flattened data anything that can be done server side. That is exactly the same way those other accelerator products already work for mobile.

While it's a nice design, it's been done. The limitations and issues are well know as well, like having trouble with private intranet sites and VPNs or that because all the requests come from a few centralized IPs, geoip doesn't offer any benefit (GEOIP is a hack anyways but sites use it and users get confused when their pages think they are where ever some colo is). It also creates a single point of failure which, pedantically, is counter to the design of the internet.

I was a little inflamed by the video's first statement that browsers have been built pretty much the same as they were since the beginning without many innovations. Sounds like marketing spin. I can name several notable amazing advancements in browser design since the days of WordWideWeb at CERN and Mosaic. A good number of amazing achievements around security for sure.

Also, on top of that, you know what happens when Silk touches Fire? It's not pretty.

icefox3• 15 years ago

(personal opinion, not opinion of my employeer rim)

The old Blackberry Java browser was split and had tons of logic in the cloud to compensate for the fact that networks were beyond slow and devices had no extra cpu and very little ram and it did make a huge difference. It feels like RIM bet big that networks were always going to be slow and cpu's wouldn't be that fast and then came along the iphone. These days networks are much faster and there are cell phone with dual core cpu's and GB's of ram. Just imagine what we will have next year! So it is all a trade off. Is putting resources into developing this hybrid browser worth more than developing something else and just waiting 12 months for faster network/devices?

Also while they don't say it on that page for the curious Amazon silk is using WebKit (from the jobs page).

staktrace3• 15 years ago

Agreed. The most interesting part of the announcement is the mention of dynamically selecting which components of the browser run on the server and which run on the client. I wanted to get more details on that but can't find much. I'm interested in how they carved up WebKit and the interfaces between the different modules that might get serialized over the air.

krishna2• 15 years ago

Well, as the networks/devices get faster, the web pages will get bigger and load more javascript than every before. We have already seen how the html/js/css growth has been since early 2000s. If not for that, all those pages with 10 years of growth of network/devices speeds, we should've blazing fast web right now!

angelbob• 15 years ago

<i>It feels like RIM bet big that networks were always going to be slow and cpu's wouldn't be that fast and then came along the iphone.</i>

Amazon is betting that slow hardware will stay cheaper than fast hardware. It's a good bet. If they could ship a $30 Kindle, they absolutely would. And eventually, they might.

naner2• 15 years ago

While it's a nice design, it's been done.

So what? It sounds like it will greatly improve the browsing experience on a under-powered small-screen tablet. And it sounds like they have improved upon the Opera and RIMs implementations.

like having trouble with private intranet sites and VPNs

That's an edge case that could be ignored ("Kindle Fire is only intended for personal home use") or worked around (separate browser/browsing mode in those scenarios). EDIT: Reading below it sounds like they have an "off-cloud" mode.

because all the requests come from a few centralized IPs

Amazon's network is massively distributed...

zbowling2• 15 years ago

Sure, it's been done. Why do consumers care? They don't really. Is this for news developers? because not much meat here for the dev crowd and they aren't announcing anything exciting here.

Also Amazon's cloud isn't so massively distributed that it's in every single location that some how makes GEOIP work which was the point.

mysmysery• 15 years ago

I think this may be much more than Operas method. Note that it includes formatting, layout and display. This makes me think they essentially run a clone of the browser on ec2 and could literally swap in the completed Dom, and layout. Or even a a memory diff. Having a persistent connection would also allow local events (clicks etc) to be sent back to mirror the state as you interact with the page.

rmccue2• 15 years ago

I wonder, in terms of having many connections, could the same thing be done by a HTTP -> SPDY gateway? It saves having a multitude of connections for a single request, and also is more compressed.

ctcherry• 15 years ago

I think that is exactly what the Silk cloud is doing: http://aws.amazon.com/amazonsilk-jobs/

rmccue2• 15 years ago

Aha! That's awesome. Apart from that, it seems like it's normal optimisation techniques (compressing/resizing images, etc).

smoyer• 15 years ago

Hmmm ... if they can reformat a 3MB JPEG to a 50KB JPEG on-the-fly, then they can also replace the ad that might have been placed on a site by the owner with one of their choosing. It would be interesting to see if there's a difference in click-through rates between Silk's user-agent and a traditional web browser.

Permit• 15 years ago

ISPs have been able to do this for years. It doesn't really happen because the outrage would be deafening.

ConstantineXVI• 15 years ago

Modifying content in-flight would raise all sorts of nice legal issues. Copyright infringement would be the most obvious one.

aforty• 15 years ago

This is way more interesting than a rebranded Android tablet.

qjz3• 15 years ago

So, a man-in-the-middle attack is a feature when Amazon is the middleman?

nextparadigms2• 15 years ago

How "safe" is a browser like this when you want to login to websites? Could they get your passwords if you log to say Gmail through it?

qjz3• 15 years ago

Even if they disable the MITM attack against SSL, or the conventional proxy, or the caching, the fact that browser internals can be shifted to their servers means they can get anything they want from your browsing session, including cookies and keystrokes.

niyazpk• 15 years ago

Here is a screenshot from 1:58 in the video: http://i.imgur.com/jcVOT.png

(If this is any indicator of the actual product), it says that the whole JavaScript processing will be done on the server.

jannes• 15 years ago

No, it is dynamic. In the video these sliders are actually moving. (And not static, as your image would suggest)

The article explains it like this:

  All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well
  as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page,
  Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will
  run locally and which will execute remotely.

DanWaterworth2• 15 years ago

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that ideally this kind of thing should be done by website owners rather than amazon?

wmf2• 15 years ago

Webmasters and developers of server-side software are extremely lazy, so that just isn't going to happen.

Also, that would require standardization which has a pretty high cost.

DanWaterworth2• 15 years ago

But not so lazy that they couldn't install turn-key server software or a proxy that would do it for them. Much of it wouldn't necessarily require new standards, it could work using existing technology. For the parts of it that would require new standards, provided there is a proven reduction in latency, it seems like the win would more than make up for the expense of making a new standard.

tomlin2• 15 years ago

The Age of The Terminal, Year One

nooneelse• 15 years ago

Shouldn't you say The Second Age of The Terminal, Year One?

tomlin2• 15 years ago

You're right. Maybe this time it'll stick? :D

JeffL2• 15 years ago

Does it seem like Amazon is solving yesterdays problem instead of futures? With the speed of CPU's doubling every 18 months and the amount of bandwidth increasing by 50% annually, the accelerating growth of CPU's and bandwidth will leave this sort of client-server architecture behind. It's only a matter of time.

JeffL2• 15 years ago

Does it seem like Amazon is solving yesterdays problem instead of the futures? With the speed of CPU's doubling every 18 months and the amount of bandwidth increasing by 50% annually, the accelerating growth of CPU's and bandwidth will leave this sort of client-server architecture behind. It's only a matter of time.

bdickason• 15 years ago

Is that bandwidth figure representative of most Americans or worldwide? We have 25 people at our company in NYC, for example, and only one of them has a connection faster than your typical Time Warner cable line.

baddox• 15 years ago

The fastest mobile phones (and even tablets) are still significantly less powerful than a netbook. Amazon's own devices will probably have even weaker CPUs than cutting edge mobile devices simply because the price point.

Alex3917• 15 years ago

IIRC US bandwidth is increasing roughly 10% per year. I'm pretty sure it's some private company that does these metrics though, as I think this is the only thing the government releases:

http://www.fcc.gov/measuring-broadband-america

I forget the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I just remember it being really difficult to actually find the statistic. But the takeaway is that although we are theoretically #27 in terms of broadband speed, our actual broadband speeds aren't that much lower than in other countries.

edit: http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/

The Akamai report here is probably the most credible source. I remember there being one other report that covered this info, but I can't find it right now.

ceejayoz2• 15 years ago

If the past is any indicator, increases in CPU and bandwidth will be followed by increases in CPU and bandwidth usage.

DrHankPym• 15 years ago

Wirth's Law

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

nupark2• 15 years ago

To a point; for the vast majority of users, the increase in hardware requirements for modern desktop tasks plateaued quite some time ago. The exception to this is video games; they've continued to drive hardware advancement on the desktop.

Mobile devices are nearly on par with where that plateau began, and there are plenty of reasons to increase the CPU/GPU performance for the purpose of games. In this context, it certainly appears to me that Amazon is wasting their resources on what amounts to a massively complex privacy snafu.

Steko• 15 years ago

They're solving the #1 aggravation issues that most new smartphone and tablet users have - slow connections.

It's true this problem is also being solved by LTE rollouts but those aren't today for most people.

roc• 15 years ago

... but Silk is being rolled out on a WiFi-only tablet. Most users won't ever have to worry about a crappy cell data connection.

Some day, sure, they'll ship with 3G connections. But client hardware on future devices will only be faster and more capable.

A SPDY-link to Amazon's private caching/compression network is a great win and differentiator. But why even open the can of worms that is two-tier _processing_?

If they're leaving flash enabled on Silk, surely that dual-core chip is capable of keeping up with the bulk of browser rendering and js tasks.

uptown• 15 years ago

Your problems may not be their problems. Their "problem" is learning as much about their customers as possible. This solution precisely scratches that itch.

Terretta2• 15 years ago

Bandwidth and CPU don't solve latency which today contributes most of your perceived page load wait, and thanks to current web practices, has been getting steadily worse. SPDY and Silk address latency.

olliesaunders• 15 years ago

Buy they’ll have the advantage that their browsers will run faster than anyone else’s.

drzaiusapelord• 15 years ago

Yeah, my transformer is Tegra2 based and pretty quick with the rendering. Tegra3 is right around the corner. Whats the use of this,really? Save 4 dollars per unit on a cheaper cpu and a little battery, but paying for it by pounding EC2 servers? Heck, we're in the age of 4G and wifi. Slow 3G might be par for the course in the iPhone world, but not elsewhere.

Danger, Opera, and Blackberry have all done this with lackluster results. Mobile Chrome has the chops to handle the modern web. This kind of pre-rendered solution might have been a good idea 4 or 5 years ago, but now its questionable and brings up issues of privacy, vendor lock in, EC2 issues (hi, my website was down for 48 hours a couple of months ago), EC2 load issues, etc.

jread• 15 years ago

This seems sort of like CloudFlare built directly into the browser. Essentially, using EC2 as an http optimizing and caching proxy through which requests are routed. They might also geo balance traffic to the closest EC2 region.

mikemoka• 15 years ago

Advantages:

-cheap devices (the fire?) get to see complex websites

-server side webgl?

-server side java applets?

Disadvantages:

-you partially browse the web on Amazon's cloud so Amazon can track your behaviour (and your data)

-your site is part of an internal network that can only be accessed using a vpn from the outside world? bad luck.

-you have to buy a cheap device to see a real pageload speed,considered that you should get your data from amazon anyway

-if the world uses ec2 for browsing its performance will probably suffer

if you have the ipad you can test a lot of similar apps anyway,like puffin or skyfire,and see if you would like it,I prefer the native browser myself,yet I know that the infrastructure would be better in theory.

shareme• 15 years ago

I am wondering could it internally be webkit node.js/webwokrer combo?

will_critchlow2• 15 years ago

SEOmoz have been seeing extreme volatility in EC2 spot pricing - could this have been related to pre-release testing of Silk?

http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/09/amazon-ec2-spot-request-vo...

wmf2• 15 years ago

One would hope that Amazon is smart enough not to over-pay for their own cloud.

(The idea that the spot price is allowed to exceed the regular price is also curious.)

will_critchlow2• 15 years ago

I wonder if they jacked up the spot price to clear out some system capacity for a big test...

zmmmmm2• 15 years ago

As a kind of side point, I find it kind of interesting that Amazon is putting the EC2 brand front and center in this. You'd have to think it would be kind of surprising if they have really built it on exactly the same cloud that they are renting to 3rd parties - but that's certainly the way they are portraying it. It seems like they are almost trying to advertise EC2 to geeks as much as they are the Silk browser.

bostonvaulter2• 15 years ago

I think Amazon.com runs on EC2 as well.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

This suggests to me an interesting idea. Lets say you used the CSS media tag to include style sheets for 'e-ink', then if such a style existed you could 'send this to my kindle'. A sort of instapaper meets Kindle Publishing.

Amazon could pull something like that off, it would be useful to have a wordpress template that included the e-ink stylesheet.

pornel2• 15 years ago

There are media queries for monochromatic screens.

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/#monochrome

(although I wouldn't expect them to actually support this properly)

mcantelon3• 15 years ago

SSL MITM FTW.

bengl3rt• 15 years ago

The best news about this in my opinion is that websites can no longer block EC2 IPs if they want to work properly on the Kindle Fire... between this and free inbound bandwidth (now we know why they made that happen in the first place), scraping just got a lot easier.

suyash• 15 years ago

How good is HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript support?

rmason• 15 years ago

Most tablet makers would kill to have this much developer interest. I'm fascinated by Silk and have wasted the better part of the day trying to figure out exactly what they're doing.

Here's an independent description of Silk behind the scenes:

http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-ad...

I am hoping that Amazon gets a developers guide up soon that fills in more of the gaps. Already on EC2 and I want to start experimenting.

naner2• 15 years ago

Google also has a massive network of distributed servers and a couple browsers. I wonder if they'll start doing this for the Android browser and maybe even as an option for faster browsing on Chome.

sundar22in• 15 years ago

Why do you need a car which goes at 300 KM/hr when you drive at 50 KM/hr all the time, and don't have any issue with speed?

When it comes to web browsing most of us have very good speed for browsing, then why do we need to speed up the browsing?

zmmmmm2• 15 years ago

While I think the idea is brilliant - do as much precomputation and rendering and content consolidation in the cloud as you can - the strange thing to me is that all this stuff is really mainly a problem for browsing over cell networks while the Fire itself only supports Wifi. It kind of hints to me that there is a 3G Fire coming, they just aren't able to release it yet ...

commanda• 15 years ago

I'm not a front end developer, but it seems to me that pre-evaluation of javascript, or even compiling the js into byte code, would be something that front end developers would want to try in order to speed up their own users' experience of their site. Is there anything that the cloud part of Silk is doing that can be applied to websites in general, regardless of what browser is doing the rendering? Or is this optimization uniquely possible because Amazon controls the browser itself?

joshfraser3• 15 years ago

there's no good way to compile to JS byte code, but pre-evaluation of JS is certainly possible and a worthwhile effort

kellishaver3• 15 years ago

It would be really interesting if they could integrate some form of parental controls along with this whole caching/prefetching/data crunching process.

Say you logged into your Amazon account and set the rating level for content available in Fire and then Amazon's servers would block your kid from accessing freepr0n4all.com. You could add exceptions, specific sites to block, etc. and there would be a known, ever-evolving database of "unsafe" sites by rating.

The ability to filter content in a mobile browser isn't something that exists as of yet, I don't believe.

If I could do this, I'd buy one for my 9yr old today.

Of course, this could then be combined with other tools to "lock down" the fire, e.g. disabling the ability to exit "cloud mode" and thus bypass the filters, password protection for app/movie purchases, like iOS parental controls do, and so on.

Cushman2• 15 years ago

Honest question from someone who grew up in the era of web content controls: Do you really think you -- or any of us -- have the technical capability to stop another person from seeing something on the Internet if they want to?

It makes sense to try to help a young child keep from accidentally stumbling across that kind of crap, but I'm highly skeptical of the idea that you can prevent your child from looking at porn full stop-- or would really want to.

kellishaver3• 15 years ago

No, not at all. I'm going with (hopefully) good parenting and crossing my fingers on that one. ;) It's preventing the "accidentally wandering into questionable content" that I'm interested in, in search results, etc.

I'm not so much even worried about protecting her from the "questionable content" because I think that's something she needs to learn to deal with (though we do of course have rules about what is and isn't allowed). I just don't want her stumbling across it on a tablet in her bedroom, where we won't notice and can't offer guidance or discussion.

We have a computer in the living room that she uses for internet access and we don't have any filtering software, etc. on it. It's just out in the open, so generally supervised.

6ren• 15 years ago

So it's OnLive for webpages; putting the client-side on the server-side. Well, half (or a dynamically allocated proportion) anyway.

But compositing dozens of network fetches from the same cloud, centrally caching the rest, and predictive pre-fetch are big wins. The endless traipsing back-and-forth is frustrating even on the desktop. These aren't new ideas, but if Amazon implements them to deliver a better experience, users won't care - and neither will you. A sad truth for pioneers.

Also gives Amazon a competitive advantage: host all your stuff with us, users will love you (google's experiments showed that even fraction-of-a-second latency loses users.)

EDIT but... amazon.com is one of the slowest websites on the internet for me, and I'd expect them to be doing all of the above on their own site...

dfc2• 15 years ago

I can not believe he used the word "decentralized" to describe silk in the video explanation.

budgi3• 15 years ago

why?

dfc2• 15 years ago

Why? Because the Amazon and specifically the AUC lies at the center of the whole architecture.

Introducing Amazon Silk

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