Slashdot Mirror
Amazon's New Silk Redefines Browser Tech
angry tapir writes "While the Kindle Fire tablet consumed much of the focus at Amazon's launch event Wednesday in New York, the company also showed off a bit of potentially radical software technology as well, the new browser for the Fire, called Silk. Silk is different from other browsers because it can be configured to let Amazon's cloud service do much of the work assembling complex Web pages. The result is that users may experience much faster load times for Web pages, compared to other mobile devices, according to the company."
Opera was doing this YEARS ago. As usual.
Frist?
Nice performance bump for users, and an incredible data mining opportunity for Amazon - who wins more?
How is this any different from Opera Turbo, which has been out for quite a while now?
It's not always lose-win or lose-lose.
When you request a page in Opera Mini, the request is sent to the Opera Mini server that then downloads the page from the Internet. The server then packages your page up in a neat little compressed format (we call it OBML), ready to send back to your phone at the speed of ninjas on jetpacks.
"While the split browser architecture is not new, Opera having been a player for a couple of years, I find the overall strategy to be an interesting spin on the me-too Android software we have seen so far, and possibly a game changer,"
But Opera is also available for Android, so this is a me-too technology, on a me-too platform - hardly a game changer.
BTW, the CAPTCHA on Slashdot is ridiculously difficult, this is my third attempt.
No trust here.
Opera released Opera Turbo back in 2009 which does this same thing. As well, Opera Mini, their mobile browser, does this as well.
So this isn't really re-defining the browser, it's just bringing the technology more mainstream.
Its not what it is, its something else.
And to paraphrase the immortal words of Mandy Rice Davies - they would say that, wouldn't they.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Did Amazon just invent Opera Mini?
I remember hearing about server-side rendering in the early days of internet-connected PDAs. Anyone know the specifics?
Didn't Opera do something similar, where they rendered the web pages on their own server and then passed it to their mobile browsers in an optimized form?
This is not radical. It's a proxy. Really, wtf has slashdot become?
Preview Edit: I guess the captcha knows the answer best. "Fibrous" was my captcha word...
Similar to operas 'render on server' browsers for mobile devices.
It's a great paradigm, even if it feels like it's harkening back to an X "thin" server...
So uh...when will they be releasing this so I can run it on my own server since I don't trust theirs further than I can throw a data center...
Just because I don't trust them doesn't mean I wouldn't love to toss this up on a coloted server. Or for that matter even my guruplug on a comcast connection.
Heck, I'd /even/ be willing to save the storage it on EC2. After running full disk crypto over a network attached block device...
We heard you like the cloud, so we put the cloud in your cloud so you can swear while you disconnect!
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
...did something similar back in 1998 or so. The Palm VII browser sent its requests to servers running in a data center. The servers fetched the page data, reformatted it for the Palm VII screen, compressed it, and sent it back down to the Palm VII. Isn't that the gist of what Silk does?
WebTV did something similar a few years earlier, reformatting Web pages so that they looked good on a TV screen, but I'm not sure if that happened on a proxy or on the device itself.
I don't want to take away from the work that Amazon is doing for Silk and in its data centers. I'm sure they spent a lot of time on it, and it's not as simple as it sounds. But the general idea doesn't seem to be as new as what they seem to be making it out to be.
This is ridiculously old technology. Just about every other mobile browser does this now other than maybe IE on Windows phones and Safari on IOS. BlackBerry's have been doing this since 2005, as someone else mentioned Opera has had it since 2009, Bolt Browser has this feature as well. So I am to believe that a browser technology that's been around for 6 years is redefining browsers now? Way to grab on to an old feature and herald it as something new and ground breaking.
The problem with a cloud solution is that you can't use it offline. What if I want to surf the web away from any WiFi access points or the cellular network?
I'd swear that Opera Mini revolutionized the whole server-side compression and rendering thing. Maybe people just don't like remembering Opera?
http://www.opera.com/mobile/specs/
What about handling secure (https) connections?
We will establish a secure connection from the cloud to the site owner on your behalf for page requests of sites using SSL (e.g. https://siteaddress.com/ ).
So essentially, they become the man-in-the-middle so they can better cache your HTTPS content? And their browser is programmed to show this is acceptable/secure... What kind of privacy implications does this introduce? Even if their privacy policy says they won't use the data maliciously, cloud computing isn't a bullet-proof system (i.e., leaks, hacking incidents, etc.). Call me paranoid, but if I read this right, this sounds like a frightening idea.
Everyone talking about how "Opera did it first" don't seem to be taking into account the pre-loading that Silk does. Whenever you visit a page with Silk not only does it fetch everything and pre-render it before sending it to your device. It also uses its algorithms to know which links you'll most likely click on (based on what others have clicked on) and starts pre-fetching that data so if/when you click on the link it'll take even less time to load.
Unlike other pre-fetching technology that had no intelligence built in this sounds very awesome.
Upon further reading, I am became interested in whether the browser would render online apps like Google Docs. It runs flash so it should run the simulations for stuff like physics and electronics. I hope that the browser is good, as this is the only thing that kept me from buying a Kindle. My feeling is that, since Amazon pays 3g, they will sacrifice the web browser to minimize costs. I would be nice if Fire with WiFi could load a more standard browser.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
And probably more that I'm not aware of.
Basically, what this service does is make a "google maps" version of the webpage -- cutting pages up into tiles (like the Nintendo NES did) and streaming them over a wireless connection from their reserved-for-holidays EC2 data centers. Some localized bastardization is involved, but the "google maps" img tiling is the basis of it.
A quick wget of the cnn.com front page yields 2.10 MB of data. And yes, it's less to tile it -- a screenshot at 1400x900, for about 40% of the page, converts into a lossless PNG file for about 700K of data. A lossy but usable 90-quality JPEG is around 350K. The processing time and RAM to bit blit that client-side of course will be a lot less than a modern ACID 2/3 browser would require.
But as sites become more dynamic, the response time to constantly stream pixels won't be worth it. And a lot of sites rely on being dynamic -- view the HTML source on Facebook some time, it's almost all JS. Even slashdot (famous for being HTML3 well into the 2000's) now feeds its stories dynamically with javascript and HTML5.
This isn't "redefining browser tech," it's probably a stopgap measure for their current market-undercutting $199 tablet processor. Anything JS/HTML5 runs fine on my dated Athlon X2 laptop on Chromium or Iceweasel, and that kind of speed will easily be in tablets in 1-2 years. Amazon says Fire is "dual core" but it's probably skimpy CPU-wise and/or RAM-wise. Or maybe their attempt to reinvent the wheel by rolling their own browser engine under NIH syndrome instead of using Webkit or Gecko just turned out badly.
If Onlive can stream a whole game (fullscreen updates) with low enough latency for it to be playable, then I'm sure that it can work for a web page. This is more about rendering time. In 1-2 years tablets will be able to easily render todays webpages. But in 1-2 years webpages will be totally different to the way they are now.
You didn't read the article, did you...?
This is more about rendering time. In 1-2 years tablets will be able to easily render todays webpages.
Tablets can already easily render web pages today.
They use webkit, the processor seems to be on par with the iPad2 or modern android tablets, it seems to me that the greatest gain comes from not having to do lots of http requests.
Even opera mini is not sending a stream of pixels, i can see this from zooming in and out and seeing the text reflow.
And I mean the Infogear iPhone from last century.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Users of noscript have long benefitted from fast loading of web pages as distracting ads pulled from other domains were suppressed.
If entire web pages are "constructed in the cloud" and then presented to users, the additional overhead of ads,
including annoying animation, would once again turn perfectly readable pages into aggravating distractions that
eventually drive readers away. Anyone remember answer.com? AskJeeves? Or cnn.com before noscript?
Bah humbug to this "improvement" in technology.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
That whole fucking 2 seconds was killing me
seriously were not running 486's here aside from slashdots javabloat every other site does not suck on modern machines, hell if you can stand not pissing you pants even slashdot only takes about a min on a 300mhz PPC
So long?? It takes less than a minute on a Cyrix P-166 running firefox 1.0 and Win95 (yeah, baby!) (don't laugh -- it's the only machine we've got at work that still has ISA slots, which we need for a bit of equipment ....)
But I agree wholeheartedly with the point. Why would anyone wish to jeopardise their privacy to save a few seconds (max) of waiting for a webpage to load? The fact that Amazon can use this as a selling point is a sad statement on current attitudes to privacy.
Defeat! Sorry for the typo.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
Or maybe their attempt to reinvent the wheel by rolling their own browser engine under NIH syndrome instead of using Webkit or Gecko just turned out badly.
You had me convinced you knew what you were talking about right up until the very end. Amazon did use Webkit. And just like that everything else you said is suspect too.
Except Amazon Fire has a 1.2GHz processor under the hood, so it should hold up to a large number of pages.
Granted, the ones with fancy animations and such aren't going to hold up well... but then again, nor is streaming said animations.
Undercutting? The OMAP 4430 SoC in the Kindle Fire isn't a slouch. It's probably faster than any mobile device you own.
They don't seem very confident in this.
I'm sure they really meant to say "users won't experience slow down while we spy on them."
That domain is unregistered. Feel free to buy it; this is clearly an SEO opportunity...
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
Skyfire does it, too.
...not a complete caching of HTTPS content (which would be pretty futile). There would only be an issue if, say, the CA system of validating what server you are talking to has got a leak, because then Amazon(/any attacker controlling (part) of the EC2 server park) could theoretically perform a real MITM (barring any legal consequences, of course). But hey, the CA system is perfect... erm... never mind...
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I love it when stuff redefines other stuff! So exciting.
sic transit gloria mundi
Why restrict yourself to a rasterized image? Sending it as a mix of vector and rasterized images would cut size down a ton with no quality loss. In fact, Skia, the rendering library behind Chrome and Android, already supports exactly that. Android's WebKit port actually spits out a SkPicture, which is a recording of the drawing commands needed to draw the page (a mix of vector and rasterized parts), which is then sent over to another thread to be drawn onto the screen. Serialization to a byte stream is supported, so just send that over the wire and you've got yourself a highly compressed, no loss representation of the page. More importantly, it can be arbitrarily scaled without quality issues thanks to it's mostly vector nature.
Whether or not Amazon did that or if they are basically just being a SPDY proxy remains to be seen, but the pieces are all there.
Which is it?
from 2002.
*Ring*
Hello? 2002? You want what? Your server-side web optimization catered to a device? Uh huh, ok. Ok, ok, I'll let Amazon know...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Macintosh...
Lets face it, us few Opera users are used to living a couple of years in the future.
Mind you until 27 Septembet 2012 I sometimes got upset but since the new law enacted two days ago put to death all IE/Chrome and Firefox users (Lynx users already got their punishment through usage) I am a lot more mellow about it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
wow. that was offensive
The use of SPDY does seem likely:
"Software Development Engineers - SPDY
SPDY is an open source network transport protocol which we have leveraged in the design of Amazon Silk. In this role, you will have end-to-end ownership of our use of SPDY. You will be expected to have strong familiarity with the protocol and to use that knowledge to come up with innovative ways to improve the customer experience. We're looking for strong team players who thrive in a startup-like environment where flexibility is essential and delivering rock solid, customer focused solutions is paramount."
http://aws.amazon.com/amazonsilk-jobs/
New things are always on the horizon
Since when is WebKit and some code from Chromium the revolutionary part and WebKit the mundane part?
I like it. Those who fear NoScript try to defear it. That makes perfect sense to me ;-).
So, let me get this straight ... Amazon's new Silk browser will make my 1950s lesbian stewardess, pudding-wrestling retro-porn websites load faster? Lots faster?! And I can hold the device in one hand? So, that leaves me asking where can I get a Fire, already? (Fire-truck! Was that in my out loud voice?)
Opera Mini isn't the only one.
One of the PalmOS browsers worked this way, doing pre-rendering at the other end to help compensate for a slow connection and a small device. If the ISP's server farm went down, so did your web browser.
I've used a satellite Internet provider that did similar as well, parsing the HTML at the provider ground station so it could fetch all the needed objects and send them in a single stream to the sky. This eliminated a lot of repeated fetch requests from the client over sat, which made a big difference since RTT was around one second.
And given that it was satellite, wouldn't that also qualify as "in the cloud"? ;-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
The main motivation for this technology is probably the ability to inject or replace ads in any webpage...
I don't know that its a processor issue; from reports its basically running the same 1.2Ghz processor that the Blackberry Playbook runs (which by all accounts is quite zippy). That puts it (roughly) on par with an ipad2, and gives it a fair amount more horsepower than an original ipad. Which again leaves me wondering why they're touting this so highly. My mother's original iPad never seemed particularly terrible when loading pages, and my HTC Sensation seems downright snappy with its dual-core, 1 Ghz OMAP processor. I guess we'll have to wait and see if it really does have some huge speed benefit, or if its just something they threw on the pile in an attempt to make the Fire look more appetizing.
Does it let you save the page in the original format? Kinda hard to do that if it's just sending you PNGs.
Hmm.. The way I read it is mostly just a caching proxy that makes a large amount of the static web available to SPDY... Not sure where you got this tiling idea from.
What are you basing this analysis on? Amazon's technical explanations don't mention "Tiling", and in fact they explicitly mention that all functions of a browser (e.g. image resizing, xml parsing, javascript execution, etc) can be executed locally by the browser, so I doubt that a simple pre-render and Tiling is the technique they're relying on most.
What's curious to me, is they indicated that all layers of browser functionality basically have some internal slider controls on whether they're offloaded or executed locally. Will users be able to tweak these? Will they be global defaults that amazon tweaks over time to improve the service in the average? (Or in either the user-tweaked or amazon-tweaked case, will it be per-site?). Will the browser be smart enough to operate directly when the amazon services get overloaded?
I'm probably dating myself to all the kids on Slashdot, but when did web pages get so complex that work now needs to be split?
I still write all my HTML by hand, optimize my images, specify the actual size of the image in the IMG tag, yadda yadda.
I *never* understood the purpose of CSS, except that it mucked things up. I was very happy with black text against grey (woot Mosaic). Heck, my favorite browser was Omniweb for NeXT.
When exactly did things get so bad that web browsers are at their limit and these tablets, which have far more power than my Amiga, can't render web pages without help?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
It actually appears to me that this is a significant challenge to Google, and any of the rest of us who depend on web analytics. Silk not only renders on the cloud, but fetches content (even whole pages) predictively for the user. In other words, Silk will hit my website even if the user has not "clicked" on my link. How can I (or Google) tell whether the "GET" is predictive or actual? Furthermore, since Silk is doing much of the rendering in the cloud, how can I be sure that my content is actually getting through (ads, for example, could be modified or replaced).
None of this is new, others have been able to do this to varying degrees for years. But the scale is new. Amazon will sell millions of Fire readers, and who is to say that Silk will remain limited to just Fire and its descendants? What if Amazon eventually releases Silk as desktop technology. I actually think Fire is the first trial of a technology that Amazon intends for much wider distribution. Why not? It can already claim great success in bringing significant web properties into the Amazon cloud, promising Silk integration will only strengthen that position. Imagine: your user can get to your website without even using the internet! The whole interaction can be in the Amazon cloud. The net is only used to cover the "last mile" to the browser.
Silk is a major play for Amazon. Possibly bigger than Kindle itself.
OK, it was ALMOST doing this in 1995, if you count a serially-attached Macintosh as "the cloud."
A researcher at some university (The University of Michigan I think) developed a Newton web browser that was just a "front end" to an engine on a Macintosh.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Please do a Silk-On-BES. Offloaded processing, but on our servers and not those of Amazon's data miners. For handhelds and Playbook.
Love and kisses, the people who gave you $,000s for BES licenses.
I don't think this is how the technology works. This is just speculation, but it probably handles the layout of the page on the server then packages up this layout information into a format more efficient than HTML and CSS then sends that down to the Fire's browser along with the content. This precalculated layout would be much faster to process and display than what the OMAP 4 processor could do on its own.
Informative? You obviously didn't rtfa. It does allows for both server side and client side processing so javascript runs perfectly fine.
The service just does three things, content compression and use of google's alternate protocol to http which is faster.
and finally:
"The browser will determine whether to download the mobile or the static version of any given website, based on the capabilities of the hardware, as well as the richness of the site itself. "It learns effectively as you're browsing to get the best possible version of the content to you," Jenkins said. This works particularly well on popular sites, where many of the common elements can be cached."
While there is room for problems, it's hardly even close to what you stated or a stopgap measure.
What gives you any idea that this is what they will be doing? I didn't see anything about them rendering in the cloud. Maybe caching or pre-fetching html based on predictions, but not rendering.
I love how people decry privacy/security, but this is nothing new. Think proxy and Content Delivery Networks(CDN.) All they need to do is implicitly not cache data containing query strings and cookies. That solves most of the problems.
Most large data (youtube video, akamai, facebook) are already using content delivery networks, and if anything trying to cache this may actually degrade the performance as the large files aren't transferred on the fly. The files that need to be cached are files over 64KB but under 8MB. So most photos, webcomics, and wikipedia type pages.
No, that's not how it works at all.
...for the Palm (and maybe other devices too, can't remember). It was really neat right up until the point where javascript started becoming widespread. The AvantGo service + Palm V + Nokia GSM phone with infrared was the last word in impressing people with the mobile web.
However, if you can't run it native, you are doomed. Phones are now so powerful that the kindle approach is silly.
Big deal, we were pioneering this whole approach at Novarra years ago.
Now that we're under Nokia, it could become a patent "hot potato". Because God knows, there aren't enough bullshit patent troll lawsuits already.