Amazon Silk

Amazon Silk
Developer(s) Amazon.com
Initial release November 15, 2011 (2011-11-15)
Development status Active
Operating system Android
Engine Blink
Available in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Chinese
Type Web browser
License See here
Website amazon.com/silk

Amazon Silk is a web browser developed by Amazon for Kindle Fire and Fire Phone.[1] It uses a split architecture whereby some of the processing is performed on Amazon's servers to improve webpage loading performance. It is based on the open source Chromium project.

Architecture

For each webpage, Silk decides which browser subsystems (e.g. networking, HTML, page rendering) to run locally on the device and which to run remotely on the Amazon EC2 servers.[2]

Silk uses Google's SPDY protocol to speed up the loading of web pages.[3] Silk gives SPDY performance improvements for non-SPDY optimized websites if the pages are sent through Amazon's servers. Some early reviewers found that cloud-based acceleration did not necessarily improve page loading speed, most notably on faster connections or for simpler web pages.[4][5]

Some privacy organizations raised concerns with how Amazon passes Silk traffic via its servers, effectively operating as an Internet service provider for those using the browser. The Silk browser includes the option to turn off Amazon server-side processing.[6][7][8] On July 26, 2016 it was reported that Silk prevents access to Google over HTTPS.[9]

Name

Amazon says "a thread of silk is an invisible yet incredibly strong connection between two different things", and thus calls the browser Amazon Silk as it is the connection between Kindle Fire and Amazon's EC2 servers.[10]

See also

References

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 10/1/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.