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Amazon’s New Silk Redefines Browser Tech
Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet recently launched in New York. What’s more interesting to us is that the company also showed off a bit of potentially radical software technology as well, namely 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 webpages. The result is that users may experience much faster load times for webpages, compared to other mobile devices, according to the company.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos noted that most modern webpages, such as Amazon’s own or CNN’s, are complex creations, with multiple photos, animations, and complex scripts and mark up code. The CNN home page, for instance, is built by the browser from 53 static images, 39 dynamic images, three Flash files, 30 JavaScript files from seven different domains, 29 HTML files and seven CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files.
The above is only an excerpt. You can read the full piecehere.
When I first read this, my first thought was that this sounds a lot like what Opera Turbo does. The comments seem to suggest this as well. Am I missing something here or are the folks at Amazon not acknowledging what Opera has done?
Originally posted by Phriend:
Am I missing something here...?
I'm afraid you do
Amazon's Silk looks creepily Phorm-ulaic
What's the difference between Phorm's controversial WebWise system, and the kind of giant web proxy unveiled by Amazon yesterday? Technically, there isn't one. WebWise and Silk are doing exactly the same thing. Both intercept private web traffic – and massage it. Both also aggregate enormous amounts of private data and make behavioural inferences from this data hoard.
Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.
Originally posted by Krake:
So the only difference between Silk and Opera is that the latter does not exploit behavioural information?Originally posted by Phriend:
Am I missing something here...?
I'm afraid you do
Amazon's Silk looks creepily Phorm-ulaicWhat's the difference between Phorm's controversial WebWise system, and the kind of giant web proxy unveiled by Amazon yesterday? Technically, there isn't one. WebWise and Silk are doing exactly the same thing. Both intercept private web traffic – and massage it. Both also aggregate enormous amounts of private data and make behavioural inferences from this data hoard.
Furthermore,
You might think of the pipe between Opera and the user as a private channel. It's tempting to inject ads into that binary stream, behavioural or otherwise. Instead it's doing something subtly different. ...
Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.
It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle: when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.
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