Amazon's Silk disrupts the microprocessor race

Holy crap are the people talking about Silk moronic.

Do you people realise this is nothing new? BlackBerry has been doing this for more than a decade, with poor results. Opera has been doing this for at least 6+ years, with slightly better results.

It's not new, and it's not a good thing. Centralizing all browsing through Amazon? Are you fucking kidding me? What kind of crazy world is this that people are excited by this development?

That, and proxying all browsing for a WiFi-only device with a dual core CPU is beyond disingenuous and absolutely unnecessary.

I'm anxious to hear more details about Silk but from what I understand so far, the protocol between the device and the backend EC2 servers is SPDY (http://www.chromium.org/spdy/spdy-protocol) or something pretty similar.

SPDY is a transport protocol, basically an improvement over HTTP to avoid the latencies associated with opening and closing many TCP sessions in order to render a single web page.

This approach also allows Amazon to maintain a huge local web cache including predictive pre-fetching. As many people have pointed out this stuff isn't 'new' other than perhaps the scale at which Amazon operates compared to existing systems.

I don't think any of this is going to change the computational requirements at the device for handling client-side processing (i.e. Javascript), which is what the author seems to suggest.

Isn't this exactly what BlackBerry did in the early 2000s? Mobile phones sucked, so they processed as much as they could on the server and sent it down compressed and easily parseable to the client?

With their infrastucture, Amazon could as well run browsers in the cloud and then update remote screens, VNC style. Other guys do that for games, latency is not an issue for them apparently.