Amazon's New Silk Redefines Browser Tech

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."

Potential privacy nightmare

[sprior]

Nice performance bump for users, and an incredible data mining opportunity for Amazon - who wins more?

Re:Prior Art - Opera Turbo

[magarity]

Opera turbo uses compression via opera's servers. Amazon's thing uses amazon's servers to render. With opera the point is to get around a slow connection on the consumer's side. Amazon's point is to do the render processing on amazon's side. Let's take an annoyingly busy website, for example: http://home.sina.com/ [sina.com] Now this beast can take a while to download and get ready, especially on a low power handheld thing like a tablet. Amazon's silk method should prep all those parts for the displaying device.

Re:Potential privacy nightmare

[timeOday]

You could just as well argue it increases privacy, since Amazon becomes a proxy service. So instead of your 1-page request hitting 10 companies' servers, each of which collects information on you, now they see a bunch of hits from Amazon.

Of course, google probably aggregates information from those ten servers anyway, and Amazon probably sells the information they collect on you anyway, and the government is probably monitoring everybody involved in any case...