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Comment by icefox | Hacker News Reader

(personal opinion, not opinion of my employeer rim)

The old Blackberry Java browser was split and had tons of logic in the cloud to compensate for the fact that networks were beyond slow and devices had no extra cpu and very little ram and it did make a huge difference. It feels like RIM bet big that networks were always going to be slow and cpu's wouldn't be that fast and then came along the iphone. These days networks are much faster and there are cell phone with dual core cpu's and GB's of ram. Just imagine what we will have next year! So it is all a trade off. Is putting resources into developing this hybrid browser worth more than developing something else and just waiting 12 months for faster network/devices?

Also while they don't say it on that page for the curious Amazon silk is using WebKit (from the jobs page).

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Agreed. The most interesting part of the announcement is the mention of dynamically selecting which components of the browser run on the server and which run on the client. I wanted to get more details on that but can't find much. I'm interested in how they carved up WebKit and the interfaces between the different modules that might get serialized over the air.

Well a good chunk of it doubt is all in the Network layer which is outside of "WebKit". Image compression, dns, fetching, pre-fetching, streaming, etc. You can no doubt get tons of win just by having a proxy server that gzip's everything that can be that isn't already. But that is just the tip, they mentioned image re-compressions, but what other trivial things like stripping javascript and html to reduce size.

But you could also do things like pre-compile the javascript and only send the bytecode down to the browser (starting to get in the relm of cool).

And we still haven't touched the dom. Of course the more you touch the harder it is to keep up to date with webkit.org. The real meat of this entire discussion has to be what gives the best bang for the buck? For WiFi devices all of this (guessing) is a waste of resource as my guess is that it doesn't improve the speed by much. I would expect the performance jumps on a cell network to be much better. So when is that device coming out?

With the old BlackBerry browser, MDS did image re-compressions using the Slipstream image libraries, and javascript pre-compilation for the ecma engine. It helped, but only so much. Reducing image sizes turns out to not be applicable all that often, unless you're not letting the user zoom in to 1:1 size. Degrading image quality (invisible to the average human eye) helps though.

If all they're doing is network stuff then there's nothing new here, and I doubt their gains will be very noticeable. I was hoping for something more involved.

<i>It feels like RIM bet big that networks were always going to be slow and cpu's wouldn't be that fast and then came along the iphone.</i>

Amazon is betting that slow hardware will stay cheaper than fast hardware. It's a good bet. If they could ship a $30 Kindle, they absolutely would. And eventually, they might.

And it isn't to say that both are good biz models.

  Expensive (high margin) fast hardware that can do more things
  Cheap (low margin) slow hardware that can do some things

The one thing we do know is that WebKit is winning. Now the big question is which JavaScript engine did they use? My gut says V8 due to the optimizations I know they could do with the cloud setup they have.

(disclaimer work for the webkit team at rim and this is all my own personal opinion)

Well, as the networks/devices get faster, the web pages will get bigger and load more javascript than every before. We have already seen how the html/js/css growth has been since early 2000s. If not for that, all those pages with 10 years of growth of network/devices speeds, we should've blazing fast web right now!

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