Amazon's New Silk Redefines Browser Tech 249
angry tapir writes "While the Kindle Fire tablet consumed much of the focus at Amazon's launch event Wednesday in New York, the company also showed off a bit of potentially radical software technology as well, the new browser for the Fire, called Silk. Silk is different from other browsers because it can be configured to let Amazon's cloud service do much of the work assembling complex Web pages. The result is that users may experience much faster load times for Web pages, compared to other mobile devices, according to the company."
No. (Score:5, Informative)
Opera was doing this YEARS ago. As usual.
Frist?
Opera Mini (Score:5, Informative)
When you request a page in Opera Mini, the request is sent to the Opera Mini server that then downloads the page from the Internet. The server then packages your page up in a neat little compressed format (we call it OBML), ready to send back to your phone at the speed of ninjas on jetpacks.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
This is just Opera Mini/Turbo (Score:5, Informative)
Opera released Opera Turbo [wikipedia.org] back in 2009 which does this same thing. As well, Opera Mini [wikipedia.org], their mobile browser, does this as well.
So this isn't really re-defining the browser, it's just bringing the technology more mainstream.
How exactly is this redefining? (Score:3, Informative)
This is ridiculously old technology. Just about every other mobile browser does this now other than maybe IE on Windows phones and Safari on IOS. BlackBerry's have been doing this since 2005, as someone else mentioned Opera has had it since 2009, Bolt Browser has this feature as well. So I am to believe that a browser technology that's been around for 6 years is redefining browsers now? Way to grab on to an old feature and herald it as something new and ground breaking.
Not sure how long this will be useful (if at all). (Score:3, Informative)
Basically, what this service does is make a "google maps" version of the webpage -- cutting pages up into tiles (like the Nintendo NES did) and streaming them over a wireless connection from their reserved-for-holidays EC2 data centers. Some localized bastardization is involved, but the "google maps" img tiling is the basis of it.
A quick wget of the cnn.com front page yields 2.10 MB of data. And yes, it's less to tile it -- a screenshot at 1400x900, for about 40% of the page, converts into a lossless PNG file for about 700K of data. A lossy but usable 90-quality JPEG is around 350K. The processing time and RAM to bit blit that client-side of course will be a lot less than a modern ACID 2/3 browser would require.
But as sites become more dynamic, the response time to constantly stream pixels won't be worth it. And a lot of sites rely on being dynamic -- view the HTML source on Facebook some time, it's almost all JS. Even slashdot (famous for being HTML3 well into the 2000's) now feeds its stories dynamically with javascript and HTML5.
This isn't "redefining browser tech," it's probably a stopgap measure for their current market-undercutting $199 tablet processor. Anything JS/HTML5 runs fine on my dated Athlon X2 laptop on Chromium or Iceweasel, and that kind of speed will easily be in tablets in 1-2 years. Amazon says Fire is "dual core" but it's probably skimpy CPU-wise and/or RAM-wise. Or maybe their attempt to reinvent the wheel by rolling their own browser engine under NIH syndrome instead of using Webkit or Gecko just turned out badly.
Re:This is just Opera Mini/Turbo (Score:5, Informative)
You're absolutely correct that the basic "innovation" here is exactly what Opera Mini (note, not Turbo - specifically Mini) has done for ages. So all talk about "redefining the browser tech" is pure marketspeak, and both the submitter and the editor should be ashamed of spinning it the way Amazon PR wanted them to.
However, there is one crucial difference with Mini here: it also does work as a full-fledged local browser. Mini always does layout and other optimizations "in the cloud", and fetches the result. That's why it's so bad at JS, Flash, HTML5 etc - if it's something that has to run locally, it's not supported. Here, they are transparently offloading work on the server, but when there is something in the page that cannot be handled well that way - or when the server is not available - it gets rendered locally, same as in any other browser. So it's supposed to be completely transparent to the user, unlike Opera.
Of course, we haven't actually seen how well that it all works in practice, and I'll reserve my judgement until then. It'll be interesting to sniff traffic and see how much actually gets preprocessed; right now my suspicion is that on any script-heavy website, it'll mostly just do compression.