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?
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.
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.
You're missing the major difference between what Opera did and what Amazon is doing. Opera did the rendering on their own server, while Amazon does it in the cloud. Totally different.
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
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.
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.
And I mean the Infogear iPhone from last century.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Not sure if trolling or just stupid...
He was engaging in an obscure practice known as humor.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.