Amazon Silk: The Mobile Web Browser That Leverages The Cloud

Frank Gruber Sep 28, 2011 Tweet

Amazon launched 4 new devices today in New York, the Amazon Fire, Kindle, Kindle Touch and Kindle Touch 3G, and along with those announcements, the Amazon Chief Operating Officer also announced the launch of a new type of web browser built specifically for mobile computing.  Amazon Silk  is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and available exclusively on the just-announced Kindle Fire.

Amazon Silk leverages a “split browser” architecture that puts some items on Amazon’s computing cloud and the device itself. This setup is said to accelerate the speed of the mobile device. For example, each time you load a web page, Silk makes a decision about which items will run locally and which will execute remotely on the cloud. The result is a faster web browsing experience.

This web browser is only available on the Amazon Kindle Fire to start, but it makes you wonder if Amazon will perfect this browser on its own devices and then eventually roll it out to other platforms. Obviously Apple and Google have their own solutions to this with Safari and Chrome, but neither has taken a completely new approach to browsing to ensure a faster experience.

Watch the video about the web Amazon Silk web browser.