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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.
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.
Well, people wanted an alternative to Google always spying on them. Be careful what you wish for.
Screw porntube.
Wait, let me rephrase that...
#DeleteFacebook
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
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.