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Silk Browser is what you'll find on the Amazon Kindle HDX 8.9. It was initially launched in 2011 with the first Kindle Fire, and Amazon explained at its launch event that Silk was made specifically for the new tablet and optimized for performance.
Basically, many tasks are performed on Amazon's incredible servers, which helps improve overall performance and load times.
The name ends up working out in two ways: Silk runs as smooth as it sounds, and yet it binds the connection between the tablet and Amazon's servers with strength. It's cheesy, for sure, but that's how Amazon describes it, and all you need to know is that it works.
We opened 12 tabs in the browser to see just how far we could push it. In normal use, we'd imagine it would be rare for most people to have 12 browser tabs open on a tablet, some heavy with animated ads.
We weren't able to cause the Silk browser to crash. However, we did find that playing YouTube and other embedded videos from within web pages didn't work, and would ask us to download the latest version of Flash Player. Unfortunately, Silk doesn't support Flash, so this is where things get tricky.
Your options are limited when it comes to viewing embedded videos, and we found ourselves frustrated enough with this that when we did find a video we really wanted to see, we'd end up getting on our computers or other mobile devices to search and watch.
While we did feel that the Silk browser can look too busy when we reviewed the 7-inch version, you get used to it after a while, and suddenly it's not so bad.
As far as browsers go, Silk isn't terrible, but it is lacking, especially in the embedded video department. We wish that it would handle embedded video like Chrome for Android does: when you click on a YouTube video, for example, it opens up in the YouTube app for viewing. You can simply click back to be taken back to the browser. That's not the case here, but we've learned to live with it.
