Quick Amazon Silk thoughts

Sadly it looks like PPK was in too much of a hurry to post some 'quick thoughts'. A little bit of additional reading (heck, even watching the video on the Silk blog) would have revealed that Silk's "split architecture" is much, much smarter than simply having the server send a bitmap of the page to the browser.

From the introductory blog post [1]:

> All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely.

Then there's the Ars article [2] that explains some of what Silk's split architecture can do:

> Amazon will load the webpage on the server side, downloading all of the necessary content elements in parallel. After downloading the content, Amazon will send the compiled page—including HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and images—back to the device as a single stream of data… The Silk browser maintains a single persistent connection to Amazon's cloud (using Google's fast SPDY protocol), through which requests are sent and content is received… An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event told us that the split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine code on the server side in situations where it will provide a speed boost.

And the Terms & Conditions [3] make it clear that Silk can stand on its own two feet if desired:

> You can also choose to operate Amazon Silk in basic or “off-cloud” mode. Off-cloud mode allows web pages generally to go directly to your computer rather than pass through our servers. As such, it does not take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing services to speed-up web content delivery.

When they say "split architecture", it sounds like they really mean it.

[1]: http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09/28/introducing-amazo...

[2]: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2011/09/amazons-silk-web...

[3]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...

"..Android WebKit, the most disappointing mobile browser right now..."

Android is great but this line is unfortunately SO true. It's especially noticable on a tablet.

I tried Dolphin instead and it's awesome. One feature I particularly like is that you can change the User-Agent header between Desktop/Ipad/Android. Now I don't have to rely on websites to determine what content I get, I can decide for myself thank-you-very-much. This should be a standard feature in all browsers.

> Silk seems to be an Opera Mini-like proxy browser, where the client asks the server to fetch and render the page, and then receives what’s basically a bitmap image. This makes for very fast browsing and little data traffic.

I doubt it's basically a bitmap image, because you lose the ability to highlight the text. My guess is that they'll essentially rewrite the markup, css, resize/recompress images and deliver it all in a single compressed stream that can be decompressed and laid out with something akin to absolute positioning.

It could even be that the assets are encoded inline using data uris, but that seems like a stretch.