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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?
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.
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
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?
Also the WAP protocol used in the early days of phone web browsers.
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.
They didn't patent it (AFAIK). WTF does prior art have to do with it?
And "How is this any different..."? uh, just read about it. Off the top of my head, it's based on Amazon EC2 and ties into that entire network - I'm not intimately familiar with Operas solution, but I doubt they have as much hardware real estate on the server side. Similar? maybe a lot, but it's not the same, and it's still something that will end up being a very new experience and thing to most people.
It's still new tech, even if done before elsewhere. New as in relative to time, as opposed to "brand new" or first time in use.
Indeed, it is. Opera is also available on the iPhone. And the blackberry. And featurephones. And Mac. And PC. And Linux. I'm not sure there's any computing platform that it's not available for...
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.
Opera turbo uses compression via opera's servers. Amazon's thing uses amazon's servers to render. With opera the point is to get around a slow connection on the consumer's side. Amazon's point is to do the render processing on amazon's side. Let's take an annoyingly busy website, for example: http://home.sina.com/ Now this beast can take a while to download and get ready, especially on a low power handheld thing like a tablet. Amazon's silk method should prep all those parts for the displaying device.
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.
What magical browser do you use that allows you to surf the web without any network connection?
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Opera turbo uses compression via opera's servers. Amazon's thing uses amazon's servers to render. With opera the point is to get around a slow connection on the consumer's side. Amazon's point is to do the render processing on amazon's side. Let's take an annoyingly busy website, for example: http://home.sina.com/ Now this beast can take a while to download and get ready, especially on a low power handheld thing like a tablet. Amazon's silk method should prep all those parts for the displaying device.
Um, yeah. So it does work exactly like Opera Turbo does. Opera turbo also down-sampled images to a lower resolution or lower number of colors which helped cut the download sizes quite a bit.
You do realize that in order to compress the data, Opera's servers have to render it first? The two technologies are more similar than they are dissimilar. From what I recall, Opera's approach is to pre-render on a proxy server, compress the end result, and send down to the device as a compact binary stream, and Silk appears to be doing pretty much the exact same thing but without any additional compression that I saw mentioned.
In any case, both have to pre-render the page and Opera's approach also removes the bulk of processing as well.
You can check if Avant-go is still around.
Funny enough, there are several solutions for this.
Opera Mini runs fine on Arm Linux.
where do you get it from?
Such as? Sure you can locally cache files but browsing in such a limited way isn't exactly what comes to mind when I think of "surfing" the web.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
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.
I use Opera Mini on a shitty little LG phone. Works quite well, I can even post to Slashdot from it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
So not only does Amazon see all the data I'm loading, but they keep a record of it too??? What could possibly go wrong here?
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...
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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...
+1 Funny
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.
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?
Which arm platform?
My N900 runs Opera Mobile 11 just fine. You can pick that build up from http://labs.opera.com/downloads/
They have just dropped support for Windows Mobile 6.5 though.
If Amazon really wants to aggregate your information they'll keep Opera Mini - and all browsers for Android - out of the Kindle Fire store. Don't forget that you can only get apps from the Amazon store, and Amazon can and will decide what you can get.
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"? ;-)
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I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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.
new [noo, nyoo] Show IPA adjective, -er, -est, adverb, noun
adjective
1. of recent origin, production, purchase, etc.; having but lately come or been brought into being: a new book.
2. of a kind now existing or appearing for the first time; novel: a new concept of the universe.
3. having but lately or but now come into knowledge: a new chemical element.
4. unfamiliar or strange (often followed by to ): ideas new to us; to visit new lands.
5. having but lately come to a place, position, status, etc.: a reception for our new minister.
Nope, doesn't fit.
Now you could say new browser or device, but thats really all that's new with this. the tech is far from new, as it's been done for the last 10+ years by Opera. Or in the computing world, its fucking ancient.
Just grab the generic J2ME version, along with the java runtimes and the J2ME wrappers.
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.
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.
No, that's not how it works at all.
IBM Domino with DOLS enabled will do it. Sure it won't let you surf to new sites that you haven't visited before, but it will let you use an entire web based application while disconnected, and interact with the application as if connected. When you do connect, any data that was updated will synchronize with the server.
So what's that have to do with Amazon Silk? No other web browsers have that functionality built in either.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
DOLS make IE and Firefox have that capability.
And why couldn't Silk have it as well? It would be able to fall back to it's local rendering and work like any other browser.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
There is no reason it couldn't. The browsers always work from local rendering. DOLS is in essence, a server wrapped as a plug in.
Of course, I was never speaking specifically of Silk. Just of the fact that offline web browsing of active content isn't impossible, and actually exists today.
How is pre-fetching relevant? It's just another thing they are doing which they ripped off from another browser, just like they ripped off Opera Mini/Turbo. Just because they are combining them into one product doesn't make either of them a revolution, contrary to Amazon's silly claims.
Clever signature text goes here.
Right.
This isn't new tech, and it sure as hell isn't revolutionary, considering that Opera and others have been doing it for ages.
Clever signature text goes here.