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Amazon Launches Web Browser For Fire TV (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: You'll never convince me that using an internet browser on a television set is anything but awkward and bad, but if for whatever reason you've been waiting to browse the web on Amazon's Fire TV devices, the company has answered that call. The Amazon Silk browser, which already comes on Fire tablets, is now available for Amazon Fire TV set-top boxes, sticks, and Fire TV Edition HDTVs. You can download it from the app store on supported devices. For now, as noted by AFTVnews, support is limited to first- and second-gen Fire TV boxes and the second-gen Stick -- plus the Westinghouse/Element 4K TV that runs Amazon's Fire TV software as its operating system. The most recent Fire TV released this fall can't yet run the Silk browser; Amazon says an update due in December will fix that.
So we can watch videos from "special sites" on our fire tv without having to cast from our phones.
Ever tried to use a streaming device in a hotel? A browser is often needed to authenticate.
but a lean, mean, spying machine that offloads processes to amazon's "cloud" (i.e. all traffic goes through amazon), not so browsers can run better on shitty hardware, but so they can see *everything you do*. no wonder amazon wants to get its "browser" up and running on these devices.
> The most recent Fire TV released this fall canâ(TM)t yet run the Silk browser...
I'm wondering what unfortunate twist of software turned the word "cannot" into "canâ(TM)t"? It seems like an implausible replacement.
Wowzers! It's a ... WebTV ... updated for 2017!
Feels like 1996 all over again (WebTV). Then again it could be 2007 all over again(Wii). From WebTV to Wii there seems to be a trend of announcing the internet in your living room every 10 years. I guess if you go 10 years before WebTV(1996) you run into Ceefax, ExtraVision, and Telidon.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I think the primary difference is that our large monitors make sense with a good keyboard, mouse, and an OS of our choosing. TVs, at least at my house, aren't configured to use this way. I don't want that type of setup in my living room. These are the reasons that I also dismiss the idea of TV browsers so quickly.
Although, as someone pointed out, 'special sites' could be better viewed on the TV. I hadn't thought of that..
As my mom used to say, "it's better to be a dipshit than an anonymous coward"..
With the right devices, browsing on a TV is actually just fine. At my house, we have an AndroidTV box with an "airmouse" attacked. It acts as a gyroscopic mouse, similar to how a Wii Remote controls a cursor on the screen. On the back side, there is a full QWERTY keyboard. For a living room environment to load up the usuals on the TV, that being OTA TV, YouTube, or other streaming services, this is actually quite a good experience for navigation. If Amazon had a better remote, this would be a decent experience, probably.
I could understand the argument if TVs were interlaced, has weird color artifacts (NTSC) and were low resolution (300-400 pixels wide). But a low-end HDTV made in the last 10 years has a stable digital picture and a pretty respectable resolution for text, photos and videos (duh).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You'll never convince me that using an internet browser on a television set is anything but awkward and bad
I've been using Waterfox for Android and a Logitech K400 wireless keyboard and it rocks! Perhaps it isn't the TV or the browser that is awkward and bad? I will admit though that every other browser I've tried (Chrome, Opera, Firefox) all felt a little off for one reason or another.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Well, people wanted an alternative to Google always spying on them. Be careful what you wish for.
..and again, and again, ad infinitum. They keep trotting this out, and it keeps falling flat on it's face. When will they learn?
Does the browser support full screen porntube?
According to the Wikipedia article about Silk, it's "based on the open source Chromium project that uses the Blink engine".
So this is yet another browser based off of Chromium/Blink, to go along with other ones like the newer versions of Opera, like Vivaldi, and like Brave. And we're all aware of how Blink was derived from WebKit, which is used by Safari.
What I find most interesting about all of this is how nobody wants to deal with the open source browser technologies like Gecko and Servo that have been produced by moz://a.
I can't blame them for avoiding moz://a's technologies. In my experience and opinion, they're inferior to Blink. Firefox 57, for example, has been a real shitshow for me, with it breaking a huge number of my extensions, and I haven't experienced the performance improvements it's alleged to offer. The Blink based browsers, on the other hand, have always been fast, light and responsive when I've used them.
I've tried Servo a few times, and it has been atrocious. Aside from lacking anything resembling a real UI, I've found that it improperly renders pages very frequently, and I also had it crash on me very often. I've heard the excuse that it's "experimental" or a "test bed", but even if that's the case it's still really bad, I think.
At this point, the main browser engine is Blink. Far behind Blink are WebKit and EdgeHTML. From what I can see, Gecko is far behind that, and Servo is basically not even there.
It's sad that it has come to this. Gecko used to be seen as one of the best, if not the best, open source browser engine out there. Now it has become a joke, and anyone wishing to embed a browser engine in their software will likely choose Blink instead.
Wireless keyboard with built-in touchpad.
Problem solved.
#DeleteFacebook
Virtual +1 funny.
#DeleteFacebook
Major problem with it is the input, and if you have solution to that, be it bluetooth keyboard or a TV with cool remote like LGs, well, where is the issue?
I actually... listen to music like that (radio swiss jazz site). My TV is also capable of switching off screen, while playing audio.
Wouldn't last a week in my house. There'd be so much sperm and other bodily fluids on it I'd have to put it on Subscribe and Save from Amazon.
No?
Then I'll never use it.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
You do not really need a keyboard every day. Once you have your bookmarks saved. For a mouse use the wireless Logitech M570 trackball. That way you do not need a mouse pad or table top. I just use the arm of a recliner. I have 3 trackballs on 3 HTPCs in different rooms. One cheep $20 Logitech wireless keyboard for all HTPCs. Use the Chrome password manager and create one Google account for all of the HTPCs then logins and cookies flow to every room. Very easy to use and the PC browser ad blocker are worth the extra money for the equipment.
It's also that unlike monitors (and phones/tablets/etc) you are, or should be, much farther away from the screen. As such elements need to be much larger in order to be readable.
First off it is silk, so meh. From what I can tell there's no multi-tab support. You can choose between bing, google or yahoo as search engines. You can turn on do not track and turn off javascript but there's no adblock. bloated sites can slow it down or lock it up, an example is CNN video. The browser's own search/bookmarks/info menu has links to cnn video. embedded youtube works fine. Even if you have a keyboard paired you'll still need the remote to click on links. It doesn't work well for long text entry because the on-screen keyboard stays up even if you're using a bluetooth one. so editing a post or say a webmail will be frustrating. Navigation uses a cursor style approach which works better than the hotspot centric approach the old WebTV's used. There's a text scaling option which you might need if you sit far away. There's no gopher support, I checked. As a TV web browser I would rate it slightly higher than the old webtv, I'll write more in depth about comparisons in another post. I wouldn't rate the experience as well as say the PS4's browser, which has multiple window support and doesn't show the OSK when typing in a text entry field. And it most certainly isn't as good as say a 10 tablet running chrome with a bluetooth keyboard. But it IS a web browser on your TV, which some people might find useful.
Makes it easier to use the stick in a hotel HDMI port on Wifi to enter my name and room number without streaming from my mobile device.
The even have remotes with a keyboard on the backside and a laser for the mouse.
It's awkward for serious browsing but works just fine for casual surfing.
Remember the term "surfing"? That's not what you're trying to do when you use a web-browser on your TV. This is for things like connecting your plex account to the plex app you just installed, or being able to hand off sites from your kindle to the big screen to show the family without a lot of fussing about and transferring stuff.
This isn't a new browser, it's the kindle/alexa ecosystem browser becoming available on a kindle/alexa ecosystem device, so the "PRAAHVAHCY!" response to this smacks of knee-to-the-nuts-in-the-mirror-jerk reaction.
For those of us who live the Kindle/Alexa lifestyle, this means Alexa being able to bring up pages on my TV instead of having to go fetch my kindle; it means that when I get pissed off trying to navigate thru Domino's pizza-ordering voice-state-machine farce, I have it bring up the web interface.
If this is "one more reason" you won't be buying a Kindle or Alexa, tell me about those aliens...
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Can't use the m570 with the tv stick or TVs but you could use the new trackball since it finally talks standard Bluetooth.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
There's no gopher support, I checked.
Gopher as in the hypertext protocol preceding the web?
Does it support <blink> and <marquee>?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
This might be a dumb question, but if the TV is an Android based "Smart Tv", couldn't you simply plug in a USB keyboard or mouse as these TVs tend to have at least one USB port on them? I bet a USB hub would work with them too if you don't have enough ports on the TV itself to plug in both a KB and mouse I can plug a mini-usb keyboard into both my smartphone and my tablet (both Android) and it works right off the bat, with no need to configure or install anything, so I imagine the same thing can be done with a Smart TV.
^to add to this, they keyboard I have was actually ment for a Windows 10 based tablet PC but works just fine with my Android devices.
If the underlying OS is Android, I bet a standard wireless keyboard and mouse combo would work with it, and you just plug the dongle for it into a USB port on the set. (I haven't even owned a tee vee in years, but my impression is that Smart TVs are generally overgrown Android tablets without the touch screen and with some custom front end slapped onto what is otherwise a fairly standard Android system)
HDTVs generally came with a standard VGA input connector so they could be used as a regular computer monitor. I bet this has disappeared in favor of HDMI, but a modern set is really just a computer monitor with a tuner added to it.
Tick off "allow apps from unknown sources" under "security" in settings, get some crappy free file manager from the Amazon "app store" (you'll need this), then go to the web to find the .APK files for Firefox, Chrome, etc. from a reputable site, use crappy file
manager to locate .APK file under "Downloads", open it/acknowledge warning boxes, app installs from .APK file, then enjoy!
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I've not had one HDTV with a VGA connector. Perhaps I bought the wrong brands, or perhaps my region doesn't normally do that. Usually my HDTVs have component inputs (Y Cb/Pb Cr/Pr), even the ones that did not have an HDMI input (very old 55" rear projection TV that I had. no 720p or 1080p. just 480i/p and 1080i).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire