Amazon announced this week the arrival of the Amazon Kindle Fire – its first ever assault on the burgeoning Android tablet market – and along with it a new mobile web browser called Silk.
The Silk browser is, according to Amazon, a 'split browser' which uses Amazon's cloud service to speed up the web on a mobile device.
The browser is both on the Kindle Fire and the Amazon EC2 (elastic computing cloud), which should make for a faster web experience – as it takes into account things like network conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content.
Working with its cloud service the browser can, according to Amazon, request all website content simultaneously with EC2, without overwhelming the mobile device processor or impacting battery life.
Revolutionary browser
Speaking about Amazon Silk, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, said: "Kindle Fire introduces a revolutionary new web browser called Amazon Silk.
"We refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack and now push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud. 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."
For the moment the Silk browser is only available on the Amazon Kindle Fire, but there's no doubt that we will see the service come to more devices soon.
For more information on the new browser, go to www.amazon.com/silk - warning, the company goes into quite a lot of detail about latency within TCP connections, learning algorithms and multiplexing protocols.
To help understand the tech behind Silk, Amazon has created a video which you can view below.
