19 ms·

Introducing Amazon Silk

430 points by sant0sk1 15y ago

jread 15y ago
This seems sort of like CloudFlare built directly into the browser. Essentially, using EC2 as an http optimizing and caching proxy through which requests are routed. They might also geo balance traffic to the closest EC2 region.
mikemoka 15y ago
Advantages: -cheap devices (the fire?) get to see complex websites -server side webgl? -server side java applets? Disadvantages: -you partially browse the web on Amazon's cloud so Amazon can track your behaviour (and your data) -your site is part of an internal network that can only be accessed using a vpn from the outside world? bad luck. -you have to buy a cheap device to see a real pageload speed,considered that you should get your data from amazon anyway -if the world uses ec2 for browsing its performance will probably suffer if you have the ipad you can test a lot of similar apps anyway,like puffin or skyfire,and see if you would like it,I prefer the native browser myself,yet I know that the infrastructure would be better in theory.
shareme 15y ago
I am wondering could it internally be webkit node.js/webwokrer combo?
deleted 15y ago
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adolph 15y ago
It will be interesting if Amazon decides to port this browser/services combo to other devices, similar to Kindle software being on lots of platforms.
- HardyLeung 15y ago
  The connectivity between the server and client side of Fire seems to be quite custom so it is unlikely a simple port. Amazon also mentioned that this is exclusive to Fire and made no mentioning of plan to expand Fire. If they do plan to expand Fire to other platforms in the future, I'd bet they mention it somewhere.
cleverjake 15y ago
This seems very similar to Opera Turbo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Turbo#Opera_Turbo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Turbo#Opera_Turbo) - no?
- falcolas 15y ago
  I'd say closer to Opera Mini, which pretty much runs everything through their proxy service. And I have to admit, it makes for a very compelling browsing experience on a phone - faster than any other mobile browser out there, with limited loss of functionality (ajax becomes a normal page turn instead of a local dom switch).
  - dave1010uk 15y ago
    Isn't Opera Mini just a "web" client that always connects through Opera Turbo? Opera Mobile and Desktop, on the other hand let you switch Turbo on or off.
    - andreaso 15y ago
      No, Opera Mini and Opera Turbo works a bit differently. While Turbo provides compression the actual rendering is always done locally. With Mini on the other hand the rendering is done server side, and then sent to the Mini client using an Opera Mini specific markup language.
      - dave1010uk 15y ago
        I they were the same so I just Wiresharked Opera Mobile on my phone (with Turbo enabled) and it looks like you're right. My phone sends HTTP requests to something.opera-mini.net, then that server sends back compressed HTTP. You must have a lot of Turbo/Mini proxy servers to handle all the clients. I guess it's against your TOS but I wonder how easy it would be to proxy another browser's traffic through Opera Turbo. Is Opera Mini's format closed or is there a spec somewhere we can see? Thanks for creating an account to reply.
moxiemk1 15y ago
"Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With each page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the mobile hardware and Amazon EC2 (i.e. which browser sub-components run where) that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content." (from http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Color-Multi-touch-Display-Wi-Fi/dp/B0051VVOB2/ref=amb_link_357575542_4?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=gateway-center-column&pf_rd_r=0N625M4JAW6DBV6QKRXA&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1321408942&pf_rd_i=507846#silk http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Color-Multi-touch-Display-Wi-Fi...) This sounds conceptually similar to how Opera delivers pages with one of its mobile browsers, which is to say that Javascript and rich web apps will be severely crippled. Is it indeed possible for the server and client to collaboratively decide what parts of my code to run client-side and which ones proxy-side and still have anything approximating good performance/identical functionality?
- cleverjake 15y ago
  I dont think there was any indication of javascript changes. At least all they mentioned was image and dns optimization, as well as prefetching and caching.
  - sparky 15y ago
    http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/09/amazon-eventdsc1686sept-2011.jpg http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/09/amazon... Now, the picture could be incorrect or stretching the truth, but there was some indication.
    - cleverjake 15y ago
      touche, sir. Thank you very much for pointing that out.
  - moxiemk1 15y ago
    On the page I link to, Amazon says "We've refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack to push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud. This lets Silk do more work, more quickly, and all at once. We call this “split browser” architecture." Computation (in the context of webpages) indicates JS to me, though they concievably could mean DOM construction. I'm fairly skeptical that transmitting a serialized DOM and unpacking it could be more efficient over mobile network connections that is using our time-honored DOM serialization, HTML. I do hope I'm wrong, as I can't see how this sort of proxy can be healthy for the web, but I don't think my speculations are out if the realm of reasonable given the information.
Cherian_Abraham 15y ago
As more of us rely on our mobile devices to browse the net, and as this trend picks up, wouldn't this mean that Amazon has a unique vantage point to see what people are searching for, in terms of content, products etc? With each product iteration or rollout, it seems like we are increasingly giving up more than our dollars at the point of sale, like privacy - allowing companies to have complete access to our browsing/spending preferences.
- smiler 15y ago
  Here's hoping Amazon give you the option to turn it off.
  - cshenoy 15y ago
    They do: "You can also choose to operate Amazon Silk in basic or 'off-cloud' mode. Off-cloud mode allows web pages generally to go directly to your computer rather than pass through our servers. As such, it does not take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing services to speed-up web content delivery." [1] [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775270 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
    - famousactress 15y ago
      Great. Double the compatibility testing.
    - culturestate 15y ago
      ".. allows web pages generally to go directly .." I wonder why "generally?" Is there some part that will always have to go through EC2?
smackfu 15y ago
Around the 3:00 mark, they start talking about interesting things, like reducing the number of network requests.
dmix 15y ago
Wouldn't the amazon silk team post on an Amazon blog?
- acangiano 15y ago
  I don't think so. Amazon has a habit of using third party services for their blogs. This particular team may just have opted for WordPress.com, instead of TypePad, like they usually do (see http://aws.typepad.com http://aws.typepad.com).
  - dmix 15y ago
    Ah, right. That at least looks Amazon-y. They could of put some effort into the logo and blog template into the new blog. It looks very blog spammy at first.
    - acangiano 15y ago
      Agreed. Maybe the Silk team should read my book. :-P
- cobrabyte 15y ago
  Google picks up updates to sites hosted on Wordpress.com usually within minutes. Amazon registered the sub-domain that would pull the most weight for the keyword term 'amazon silk.' It's amazing how quick Google picks up changes to Wordpress.com blogs. So, it's just an SEM thing. They'll probably have a post to the official channel soon.
  - Maxious 15y ago
    > It's amazing how quick Google picks up changes to Wordpress.com blogs. Via PubSubHubBub, right? http://mashable.com/2010/03/03/wordpress-pubsubhubbub/ http://mashable.com/2010/03/03/wordpress-pubsubhubbub/
    - joshfraser 15y ago
pw 15y ago
A Wordpress blog running a theme from WooThemes. I guess we know we're dealing directly with the developers (but at least they listened to patio11's advice ;-).
justinph 15y ago
This sounds like the tips & tricks you see in Pagespeed/Yslow, moving it to a proxy, coupling it with something like SPDY, and mixing in some server side caching. Which is neat, and no doubt will achieve some speedups. But I don't know if it is as revolutionary as Amazon is trying to make it sound. There are also some serious privacy implications here. I don't really know if I want Amazon to cache & potentially record all my browsing, especially since that device is something they can directly connect to all my personal info (purchasing history, CC number, home address, etc..).
- cshenoy 15y ago
  To be fair, Amazon is doing what our ISPs do already: cache sites to deliver it faster. Also, Amazon's privacy statement says you can make Silk a normal browser by selecting the "off-cloud" mode [1]. Off-cloud mode allows web pages to go directly to the device rather than pass through their servers. I'm sure most users won't know of this option but at least it is an option. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775270 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
  - mcantelon 15y ago
    They do claim they're going to monitor browsing patterns. More food for their recommendation engines.
    - thebigshane 15y ago
      Source? Was that in the video? I hadn't read that anywhere.
      - mcantelon 15y ago
        Yeah, they mentioned that in the video where the engineer-y guys were talking (it's about 3/4 the way into the video if I remember correctly).
      - artursapek 15y ago
castewart 15y ago
Does anyone have a link to the discussion about Amazon doing more tech-related disruption than Google?
tryke 15y ago
The technology looks interesting, but it looks like Amazon gets to track all web surfing that you do on the Kindle Fire?
pp13 15y ago
"Computing Power in the Cloud EC2 servers have massive computational power. On EC2, available CPU, storage, and available memory can be orders of magnitudes larger than on mobile devices. Silk uses the power and speed of the EC2 server fleet to retrieve all of the components of a website simultaneously, and delivers them to Kindle Fire in a single, fast stream. Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life." http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2#silk http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2#silk What does this mean? "Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life". Are we offloading javascripting processing to the cloud and returning the results? If so it will be different than Opera Mini.
- pp13 15y ago
  From ArsTechnica, "Amazon has also added a few unique twists of its own that will further improve the user experience. An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event told us that the split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine code on the server side in situations where it will provide a speed boost. He also told us that Amazon will track whether users prefer the full or mobile versions of various websites so that they can predict which one is better to send to users."
harrisreynolds 15y ago
This Silk browser could be the "killer feature" of the Kindle Fire... something that allows it to really compete in the tablet space. It'll be interesting to really see how well it works in the real world and what the form factor of the Fire feels like.
- guyht 15y ago
  I agree with this. Imo, this is a good step for web browsers.
  - antimarketing 15y ago
    This is a temporary move, when 4G becomes widely available in a couple of years or even six months from now, in some countries web optimization via cloud computing will become a trivial.
- miles_matthias 15y ago
  I disagree. It is a good step for browsers everywhere, and hopefully will do more to push other browsers to use split processing, but the Fire will capture a new market of price-minded consumers who would never pay over twice as much for an iPad. Like Bezos said, it's all about bringing that level of product to a lower level price range.
  - r00fus 15y ago
    If browsing (and thus all web-apps) are much faster than on the iPad, it will push the state of the art... security (https) be damned.
    - miles_matthias 15y ago
      So to me there's two parts of introducing new technology that every group has to address: the technical advances and the policy around the new technology for consumers. Amazon is obviously doing a good job to help the technical side of it, but so far I think they're failing on the policy. They haven't mentioned the ability to shut off the split processing or use a different browser, and the answers to their privacy FAQs on privacy on their website are totally evasive. I think they're going to find themselves in a world of hurt if they don't start being more open about their policies, but who knows, it may end up not mattering to the masses.
colinprince 15y ago
How does SSL work with this? Wouldn't a lot of certificates get broken?
- mildweed 15y ago
  the SSL would have to stop in the EC2 instance where the bulk of the 'browser' is. Its then up to the Silk infrastructure to ensure the transmissions from the Fire to EC2 would be secure as well.
  - thepumpkin1979 15y ago
    Sounds like a "secure" man-in-the-middle "hack"...?
- mike-cardwell 15y ago
  Opera Turbo is a similar service to this, but it doesn't intercept https connections. Hopefully Amazon's service will behave the same way. If not, there will be a privacy shit storm.
- johnpaulett 15y ago
  From the FAQ [1]: 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). Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html//ref=amb_link_357584342_3?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200775440&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-21-0&pf_rd_r=0TVXTAYDDY8QCBJQHQB1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=1321395082&pf_rd_i=B0051VVOB2 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html//ref=amb...
  - raganwald 15y ago
    I’d like to hear more about what “facilitate” means. Is the connection from the device right through EC2 out to the site secure, even from Amazon? Or, is the connection from the device to Amazon secure, and the connection from Amazon to the site secure, but Amazon is acting as a man-in-the-middle? Or, is the connection from the device to Amazon insecure, Amazon is acting as a man-in-the-middle, but the connection from Amazon to the site is secure? I may be having a slow neuron day, but the wording of the FAQ doesn’t seem to definitively state which of these three cases holds?
powerfulninja 15y ago
"Our back end has some of the fattest pipes you'll find" - Amazon
jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
What is the rendering engine for this? Is it Webkit or something else?
- hellweaver666 15y ago
  If it's anything but Webkit, I won't be testing my sites in it unless they manage to get decent penetration. Until it outranks IE6 in my stats, I won't even be giving it a look in.
- cshenoy 15y ago
  It's powered by a WebKit engine. Amazon Silk jobs are asking for Webkit engineers [1]. Presumably, they've modded the underlying Android browser. [1] https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/152694/job?in_iframe=1 https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/152694/job?in_iframe=1
  - lyso 15y ago
    Interesting that you can use Webkit to build your browser but still call it "all-new".
    - jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
      So you must think there's no difference between Safari and Chrome then. Rendering engine:browser::Car:engine
      - Terretta 15y ago
        One of those pairs seems backwards.
      - rbarooah 15y ago
        He didn't say there was no difference - just that it's obviously not 'all-new'.
mvkel 15y ago
Don't do your banking on it!
- VonLipwig 15y ago
  This is what I was thinking, surely privacy becomes an issue if all of your data is going through what is essentially a 3rd party. Maybe secure connections bypass EC2?
ck2 15y ago
Why would Amazon be on wordpress.com? That's not for real is it?
- vitobcn 15y ago
  It is. It redirects to wordpress from http://www.amazon.com/silk http://www.amazon.com/silk
- josefresco 15y ago
  Amazon is on probably on WordPress because a lot of other high profile/high traffic blogs are hosted there as well.
  - ck2 15y ago
    Except Amazon's CDN and hosting resources dwarfs wordpress.com I mean they aren't even using an amazon subdomain or their own domain - it all looks like an afterthought someone had this week "oh yeah we should have a blog, where can I set one up in a few minutes".
    - ceejayoz 15y ago
      Their CDN and hosting resources may dwarf WordPress.com, but WordPress.com's main competency is keeping high-traffic blogs up and running nicely. There's no reason for Amazon to move into the blog hosting business, especially when you can get a custom domain and design on WP.com.
- tmcw 15y ago
  2nd this: for a big product rollout, this site URL presence & 'blog design' is so amateurish it feels like a phishing or SEO attack.
  - josefresco 15y ago
    The smart people at http://automattic.com/ http://automattic.com/ might take umbrage with your classification of their services.
johnbender 15y ago
For those of us working on mobile browsers this means a whole new set of implementation quirks we have to deal with even without the server side assist they are including. Even if they choose webkit as the rendering engine god knows what the event system will behave like.
zbowling 15y ago
So... from the sounds of it... they rebuilt what Opera Mobile does and what RIM does with Blackberry? They offload some of the compositing and some of the fetching and asset flattening server side, and then serve up to the device with custom protocol the pre-rendered flattened data anything that can be done server side. That is exactly the same way those other accelerator products already work for mobile. While it's a nice design, it's been done. The limitations and issues are well know as well, like having trouble with private intranet sites and VPNs or that because all the requests come from a few centralized IPs, geoip doesn't offer any benefit (GEOIP is a hack anyways but sites use it and users get confused when their pages think they are where ever some colo is). It also creates a single point of failure which, pedantically, is counter to the design of the internet. I was a little inflamed by the video's first statement that browsers have been built pretty much the same as they were since the beginning without many innovations. Sounds like marketing spin. I can name several notable amazing advancements in browser design since the days of WordWideWeb at CERN and Mosaic. A good number of amazing achievements around security for sure. Also, on top of that, you know what happens when Silk touches Fire? It's not pretty.
- icefox 15y ago
  (personal opinion, not opinion of my employeer rim) The old Blackberry Java browser was split and had tons of logic in the cloud to compensate for the fact that networks were beyond slow and devices had no extra cpu and very little ram and it did make a huge difference. It feels like RIM bet big that networks were always going to be slow and cpu's wouldn't be that fast and then came along the iphone. These days networks are much faster and there are cell phone with dual core cpu's and GB's of ram. Just imagine what we will have next year! So it is all a trade off. Is putting resources into developing this hybrid browser worth more than developing something else and just waiting 12 months for faster network/devices? Also while they don't say it on that page for the curious Amazon silk is using WebKit (from the jobs page).
  - staktrace 15y ago
    Agreed. The most interesting part of the announcement is the mention of dynamically selecting which components of the browser run on the server and which run on the client. I wanted to get more details on that but can't find much. I'm interested in how they carved up WebKit and the interfaces between the different modules that might get serialized over the air.
mysmysery 15y ago
I think this may be much more than Operas method. Note that it includes formatting, layout and display. This makes me think they essentially run a clone of the browser on ec2 and could literally swap in the completed Dom, and layout. Or even a a memory diff. Having a persistent connection would also allow local events (clicks etc) to be sent back to mirror the state as you interact with the page.
rmccue 15y ago
I wonder, in terms of having many connections, could the same thing be done by a HTTP -> SPDY gateway? It saves having a multitude of connections for a single request, and also is more compressed.
- ctcherry 15y ago
  I think that is exactly what the Silk cloud is doing: http://aws.amazon.com/amazonsilk-jobs/ http://aws.amazon.com/amazonsilk-jobs/
  - rmccue 15y ago
    Aha! That's awesome. Apart from that, it seems like it's normal optimisation techniques (compressing/resizing images, etc).
smoyer 15y ago
Hmmm ... if they can reformat a 3MB JPEG to a 50KB JPEG on-the-fly, then they can also replace the ad that might have been placed on a site by the owner with one of their choosing. It would be interesting to see if there's a difference in click-through rates between Silk's user-agent and a traditional web browser.
- Permit 15y ago
  ISPs have been able to do this for years. It doesn't really happen because the outrage would be deafening.
- ConstantineXVI 15y ago
  Modifying content in-flight would raise all sorts of nice legal issues. Copyright infringement would be the most obvious one.
aforty 15y ago
This is way more interesting than a rebranded Android tablet.
qjz 15y ago
So, a man-in-the-middle attack is a feature when Amazon is the middleman?
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  How "safe" is a browser like this when you want to login to websites? Could they get your passwords if you log to say Gmail through it?
  - qjz 15y ago
    Even if they disable the MITM attack against SSL, or the conventional proxy, or the caching, the fact that browser internals can be shifted to their servers means they can get anything they want from your browsing session, including cookies and keystrokes.
    - nextparadigms 15y ago
      Great, so if this thing becomes popular, the Government will be able to verify all that data and passwords at will, with just one phone call, like it happened with Wikileaks.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
niyazpk 15y ago
Here is a screenshot from 1:58 in the video: http://i.imgur.com/jcVOT.png http://i.imgur.com/jcVOT.png (If this is any indicator of the actual product), it says that the whole JavaScript processing will be done on the server.
- jannes 15y ago
  No, it is dynamic. In the video these sliders are actually moving. (And not static, as your image would suggest) The article explains it like this: All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely.
DanWaterworth 15y ago
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that ideally this kind of thing should be done by website owners rather than amazon?
- wmf 15y ago
  Webmasters and developers of server-side software are extremely lazy, so that just isn't going to happen. Also, that would require standardization which has a pretty high cost.
  - DanWaterworth 15y ago
    But not so lazy that they couldn't install turn-key server software or a proxy that would do it for them. Much of it wouldn't necessarily require new standards, it could work using existing technology. For the parts of it that would require new standards, provided there is a proven reduction in latency, it seems like the win would more than make up for the expense of making a new standard.
tomlin 15y ago
The Age of The Terminal, Year One
- nooneelse 15y ago
  Shouldn't you say The Second Age of The Terminal, Year One?
  - tomlin 15y ago
    You're right. Maybe this time it'll stick? :D
deleted 15y ago
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JeffL 15y ago
Does it seem like Amazon is solving yesterdays problem instead of futures? With the speed of CPU's doubling every 18 months and the amount of bandwidth increasing by 50% annually, the accelerating growth of CPU's and bandwidth will leave this sort of client-server architecture behind. It's only a matter of time.
JeffL 15y ago
Does it seem like Amazon is solving yesterdays problem instead of the futures? With the speed of CPU's doubling every 18 months and the amount of bandwidth increasing by 50% annually, the accelerating growth of CPU's and bandwidth will leave this sort of client-server architecture behind. It's only a matter of time.
- baddox 15y ago
  The fastest mobile phones (and even tablets) are still significantly less powerful than a netbook. Amazon's own devices will probably have even weaker CPUs than cutting edge mobile devices simply because the price point.
- Alex3917 15y ago
  IIRC US bandwidth is increasing roughly 10% per year. I'm pretty sure it's some private company that does these metrics though, as I think this is the only thing the government releases: http://www.fcc.gov/measuring-broadband-america http://www.fcc.gov/measuring-broadband-america I forget the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I just remember it being really difficult to actually find the statistic. But the takeaway is that although we are theoretically #27 in terms of broadband speed, our actual broadband speeds aren't that much lower than in other countries. edit: http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ The Akamai report here is probably the most credible source. I remember there being one other report that covered this info, but I can't find it right now.
- bdickason 15y ago
  Is that bandwidth figure representative of most Americans or worldwide? We have 25 people at our company in NYC, for example, and only one of them has a connection faster than your typical Time Warner cable line.
- ceejayoz 15y ago
  If the past is any indicator, increases in CPU and bandwidth will be followed by increases in CPU and bandwidth usage.
  - 15y ago
will_critchlow 15y ago
SEOmoz have been seeing extreme volatility in EC2 spot pricing - could this have been related to pre-release testing of Silk? http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/09/amazon-ec2-spot-request-volatility-hits-1000hour/ http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/09/amazon-ec2-spot-request-vo...
- wmf 15y ago
  One would hope that Amazon is smart enough not to over-pay for their own cloud. (The idea that the spot price is allowed to exceed the regular price is also curious.)
  - will_critchlow 15y ago
    I wonder if they jacked up the spot price to clear out some system capacity for a big test...
- zmmmmm 15y ago
  As a kind of side point, I find it kind of interesting that Amazon is putting the EC2 brand front and center in this. You'd have to think it would be kind of surprising if they have really built it on exactly the same cloud that they are renting to 3rd parties - but that's certainly the way they are portraying it. It seems like they are almost trying to advertise EC2 to geeks as much as they are the Silk browser.
  - bostonvaulter2 15y ago
    I think Amazon.com runs on EC2 as well.
ChuckMcM 15y ago
This suggests to me an interesting idea. Lets say you used the CSS media tag to include style sheets for 'e-ink', then if such a style existed you could 'send this to my kindle'. A sort of instapaper meets Kindle Publishing. Amazon could pull something like that off, it would be useful to have a wordpress template that included the e-ink stylesheet.
- pornel 15y ago
  There are media queries for monochromatic screens. http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/#monochrome http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/#monochrome (although I wouldn't expect them to actually support this properly)
mcantelon 15y ago
SSL MITM FTW.
bengl3rt 15y ago
The best news about this in my opinion is that websites can no longer block EC2 IPs if they want to work properly on the Kindle Fire... between this and free inbound bandwidth (now we know why they made that happen in the first place), scraping just got a lot easier.
suyash 15y ago
How good is HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript support?
rmason 15y ago
Most tablet makers would kill to have this much developer interest. I'm fascinated by Silk and have wasted the better part of the day trying to figure out exactly what they're doing. Here's an independent description of Silk behind the scenes: http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-adds-new-twist-to-old-idea/ http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-ad... I am hoping that Amazon gets a developers guide up soon that fills in more of the gaps. Already on EC2 and I want to start experimenting.
naner 15y ago
Google also has a massive network of distributed servers and a couple browsers. I wonder if they'll start doing this for the Android browser and maybe even as an option for faster browsing on Chome.
sundar22in 15y ago
Why do you need a car which goes at 300 KM/hr when you drive at 50 KM/hr all the time, and don't have any issue with speed? When it comes to web browsing most of us have very good speed for browsing, then why do we need to speed up the browsing?
zmmmmm 15y ago
While I think the idea is brilliant - do as much precomputation and rendering and content consolidation in the cloud as you can - the strange thing to me is that all this stuff is really mainly a problem for browsing over cell networks while the Fire itself only supports Wifi. It kind of hints to me that there is a 3G Fire coming, they just aren't able to release it yet ...
commanda 15y ago
I'm not a front end developer, but it seems to me that pre-evaluation of javascript, or even compiling the js into byte code, would be something that front end developers would want to try in order to speed up their own users' experience of their site. Is there anything that the cloud part of Silk is doing that can be applied to websites in general, regardless of what browser is doing the rendering? Or is this optimization uniquely possible because Amazon controls the browser itself?
- joshfraser 15y ago
  there's no good way to compile to JS byte code, but pre-evaluation of JS is certainly possible and a worthwhile effort
kellishaver 15y ago
It would be really interesting if they could integrate some form of parental controls along with this whole caching/prefetching/data crunching process. Say you logged into your Amazon account and set the rating level for content available in Fire and then Amazon's servers would block your kid from accessing freepr0n4all.com. You could add exceptions, specific sites to block, etc. and there would be a known, ever-evolving database of "unsafe" sites by rating. The ability to filter content in a mobile browser isn't something that exists as of yet, I don't believe. If I could do this, I'd buy one for my 9yr old today. Of course, this could then be combined with other tools to "lock down" the fire, e.g. disabling the ability to exit "cloud mode" and thus bypass the filters, password protection for app/movie purchases, like iOS parental controls do, and so on.
- Cushman 15y ago
  Honest question from someone who grew up in the era of web content controls: Do you really think you -- or any of us -- have the technical capability to stop another person from seeing something on the Internet if they want to? It makes sense to try to help a young child keep from accidentally stumbling across that kind of crap, but I'm highly skeptical of the idea that you can prevent your child from looking at porn full stop-- or would really want to.
  - kellishaver 15y ago
    No, not at all. I'm going with (hopefully) good parenting and crossing my fingers on that one. ;) It's preventing the "accidentally wandering into questionable content" that I'm interested in, in search results, etc. I'm not so much even worried about protecting her from the "questionable content" because I think that's something she needs to learn to deal with (though we do of course have rules about what is and isn't allowed). I just don't want her stumbling across it on a tablet in her bedroom, where we won't notice and can't offer guidance or discussion. We have a computer in the living room that she uses for internet access and we don't have any filtering software, etc. on it. It's just out in the open, so generally supervised.
    - 15y ago
6ren 15y ago
So it's OnLive for webpages; putting the client-side on the server-side. Well, half (or a dynamically allocated proportion) anyway. But compositing dozens of network fetches from the same cloud, centrally caching the rest, and predictive pre-fetch are big wins. The endless traipsing back-and-forth is frustrating even on the desktop. These aren't new ideas, but if Amazon implements them to deliver a better experience, users won't care - and neither will you. A sad truth for pioneers. Also gives Amazon a competitive advantage: host all your stuff with us, users will love you (google's experiments showed that even fraction-of-a-second latency loses users.) EDIT but... amazon.com is one of the slowest websites on the internet for me, and I'd expect them to be doing all of the above on their own site...
dfc 15y ago
I can not believe he used the word "decentralized" to describe silk in the video explanation.
- budgi3 15y ago
  why?
  - dfc 15y ago
    Why? Because the Amazon and specifically the AUC lies at the center of the whole architecture.

430 points by sant0sk1 15y ago

jread 15y ago

This seems sort of like CloudFlare built directly into the browser. Essentially, using EC2 as an http optimizing and caching proxy through which requests are routed. They might also geo balance traffic to the closest EC2 region.

mikemoka 15y ago

Advantages: -cheap devices (the fire?) get to see complex websites -server side webgl? -server side java applets? Disadvantages: -you partially browse the web on Amazon's cloud so Amazon can track your behaviour (and your data) -your site is part of an internal network that can only be accessed using a vpn from the outside world? bad luck. -you have to buy a cheap device to see a real pageload speed,considered that you should get your data from amazon anyway -if the world uses ec2 for browsing its performance will probably suffer if you have the ipad you can test a lot of similar apps anyway,like puffin or skyfire,and see if you would like it,I prefer the native browser myself,yet I know that the infrastructure would be better in theory.

shareme 15y ago

I am wondering could it internally be webkit node.js/webwokrer combo?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

adolph 15y ago

It will be interesting if Amazon decides to port this browser/services combo to other devices, similar to Kindle software being on lots of platforms.

HardyLeung 15y ago
The connectivity between the server and client side of Fire seems to be quite custom so it is unlikely a simple port. Amazon also mentioned that this is exclusive to Fire and made no mentioning of plan to expand Fire. If they do plan to expand Fire to other platforms in the future, I'd bet they mention it somewhere.

cleverjake 15y ago

This seems very similar to Opera Turbo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Turbo#Opera_Turbo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opera_Turbo#Opera_Turbo) - no?

falcolas 15y ago
I'd say closer to Opera Mini, which pretty much runs everything through their proxy service. And I have to admit, it makes for a very compelling browsing experience on a phone - faster than any other mobile browser out there, with limited loss of functionality (ajax becomes a normal page turn instead of a local dom switch).
- dave1010uk 15y ago
  Isn't Opera Mini just a "web" client that always connects through Opera Turbo? Opera Mobile and Desktop, on the other hand let you switch Turbo on or off.
  - andreaso 15y ago
    No, Opera Mini and Opera Turbo works a bit differently. While Turbo provides compression the actual rendering is always done locally. With Mini on the other hand the rendering is done server side, and then sent to the Mini client using an Opera Mini specific markup language.
    - dave1010uk 15y ago
      I they were the same so I just Wiresharked Opera Mobile on my phone (with Turbo enabled) and it looks like you're right. My phone sends HTTP requests to something.opera-mini.net, then that server sends back compressed HTTP. You must have a lot of Turbo/Mini proxy servers to handle all the clients. I guess it's against your TOS but I wonder how easy it would be to proxy another browser's traffic through Opera Turbo. Is Opera Mini's format closed or is there a spec somewhere we can see? Thanks for creating an account to reply.

moxiemk1 15y ago

"Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With each page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the mobile hardware and Amazon EC2 (i.e. which browser sub-components run where) that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content." (from http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Color-Multi-touch-Display-Wi-Fi/dp/B0051VVOB2/ref=amb_link_357575542_4?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=gateway-center-column&pf_rd_r=0N625M4JAW6DBV6QKRXA&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1321408942&pf_rd_i=507846#silk http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Color-Multi-touch-Display-Wi-Fi...) This sounds conceptually similar to how Opera delivers pages with one of its mobile browsers, which is to say that Javascript and rich web apps will be severely crippled. Is it indeed possible for the server and client to collaboratively decide what parts of my code to run client-side and which ones proxy-side and still have anything approximating good performance/identical functionality?

cleverjake 15y ago
I dont think there was any indication of javascript changes. At least all they mentioned was image and dns optimization, as well as prefetching and caching.
- sparky 15y ago
  http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/09/amazon-eventdsc1686sept-2011.jpg http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/09/amazon... Now, the picture could be incorrect or stretching the truth, but there was some indication.
  - cleverjake 15y ago
    touche, sir. Thank you very much for pointing that out.
- moxiemk1 15y ago
  On the page I link to, Amazon says "We've refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack to push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud. This lets Silk do more work, more quickly, and all at once. We call this “split browser” architecture." Computation (in the context of webpages) indicates JS to me, though they concievably could mean DOM construction. I'm fairly skeptical that transmitting a serialized DOM and unpacking it could be more efficient over mobile network connections that is using our time-honored DOM serialization, HTML. I do hope I'm wrong, as I can't see how this sort of proxy can be healthy for the web, but I don't think my speculations are out if the realm of reasonable given the information.

Cherian_Abraham 15y ago

As more of us rely on our mobile devices to browse the net, and as this trend picks up, wouldn't this mean that Amazon has a unique vantage point to see what people are searching for, in terms of content, products etc? With each product iteration or rollout, it seems like we are increasingly giving up more than our dollars at the point of sale, like privacy - allowing companies to have complete access to our browsing/spending preferences.

smiler 15y ago
Here's hoping Amazon give you the option to turn it off.
- cshenoy 15y ago
  They do: "You can also choose to operate Amazon Silk in basic or 'off-cloud' mode. Off-cloud mode allows web pages generally to go directly to your computer rather than pass through our servers. As such, it does not take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing services to speed-up web content delivery." [1] [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775270 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
  - famousactress 15y ago
    Great. Double the compatibility testing.
  - culturestate 15y ago
    ".. allows web pages generally to go directly .." I wonder why "generally?" Is there some part that will always have to go through EC2?

smackfu 15y ago

Around the 3:00 mark, they start talking about interesting things, like reducing the number of network requests.

dmix 15y ago

Wouldn't the amazon silk team post on an Amazon blog?

acangiano 15y ago
I don't think so. Amazon has a habit of using third party services for their blogs. This particular team may just have opted for WordPress.com, instead of TypePad, like they usually do (see http://aws.typepad.com http://aws.typepad.com).
- dmix 15y ago
  Ah, right. That at least looks Amazon-y. They could of put some effort into the logo and blog template into the new blog. It looks very blog spammy at first.
  - acangiano 15y ago
    Agreed. Maybe the Silk team should read my book. :-P
cobrabyte 15y ago
Google picks up updates to sites hosted on Wordpress.com usually within minutes. Amazon registered the sub-domain that would pull the most weight for the keyword term 'amazon silk.' It's amazing how quick Google picks up changes to Wordpress.com blogs. So, it's just an SEM thing. They'll probably have a post to the official channel soon.
- Maxious 15y ago
  > It's amazing how quick Google picks up changes to Wordpress.com blogs. Via PubSubHubBub, right? http://mashable.com/2010/03/03/wordpress-pubsubhubbub/ http://mashable.com/2010/03/03/wordpress-pubsubhubbub/
  - joshfraser 15y ago

pw 15y ago

A Wordpress blog running a theme from WooThemes. I guess we know we're dealing directly with the developers (but at least they listened to patio11's advice ;-).

justinph 15y ago

This sounds like the tips & tricks you see in Pagespeed/Yslow, moving it to a proxy, coupling it with something like SPDY, and mixing in some server side caching. Which is neat, and no doubt will achieve some speedups. But I don't know if it is as revolutionary as Amazon is trying to make it sound. There are also some serious privacy implications here. I don't really know if I want Amazon to cache & potentially record all my browsing, especially since that device is something they can directly connect to all my personal info (purchasing history, CC number, home address, etc..).

cshenoy 15y ago
To be fair, Amazon is doing what our ISPs do already: cache sites to deliver it faster. Also, Amazon's privacy statement says you can make Silk a normal browser by selecting the "off-cloud" mode [1]. Off-cloud mode allows web pages to go directly to the device rather than pass through their servers. I'm sure most users won't know of this option but at least it is an option. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775270 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...
- mcantelon 15y ago
  They do claim they're going to monitor browsing patterns. More food for their recommendation engines.
  - thebigshane 15y ago
    Source? Was that in the video? I hadn't read that anywhere.
    - mcantelon 15y ago
      Yeah, they mentioned that in the video where the engineer-y guys were talking (it's about 3/4 the way into the video if I remember correctly).
    - artursapek 15y ago

castewart 15y ago

Does anyone have a link to the discussion about Amazon doing more tech-related disruption than Google?

tryke 15y ago

The technology looks interesting, but it looks like Amazon gets to track all web surfing that you do on the Kindle Fire?

pp13 15y ago

"Computing Power in the Cloud EC2 servers have massive computational power. On EC2, available CPU, storage, and available memory can be orders of magnitudes larger than on mobile devices. Silk uses the power and speed of the EC2 server fleet to retrieve all of the components of a website simultaneously, and delivers them to Kindle Fire in a single, fast stream. Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life." http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2#silk http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0051VVOB2#silk What does this mean? "Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life". Are we offloading javascripting processing to the cloud and returning the results? If so it will be different than Opera Mini.

pp13 15y ago
From ArsTechnica, "Amazon has also added a few unique twists of its own that will further improve the user experience. An Amazon engineer at the New York launch event told us that the split browsing infrastructure can even compile JavaScript to ARM machine code on the server side in situations where it will provide a speed boost. He also told us that Amazon will track whether users prefer the full or mobile versions of various websites so that they can predict which one is better to send to users."

harrisreynolds 15y ago

This Silk browser could be the "killer feature" of the Kindle Fire... something that allows it to really compete in the tablet space. It'll be interesting to really see how well it works in the real world and what the form factor of the Fire feels like.

guyht 15y ago
I agree with this. Imo, this is a good step for web browsers.
- antimarketing 15y ago
  This is a temporary move, when 4G becomes widely available in a couple of years or even six months from now, in some countries web optimization via cloud computing will become a trivial.
miles_matthias 15y ago
I disagree. It is a good step for browsers everywhere, and hopefully will do more to push other browsers to use split processing, but the Fire will capture a new market of price-minded consumers who would never pay over twice as much for an iPad. Like Bezos said, it's all about bringing that level of product to a lower level price range.
- r00fus 15y ago
  If browsing (and thus all web-apps) are much faster than on the iPad, it will push the state of the art... security (https) be damned.
  - miles_matthias 15y ago
    So to me there's two parts of introducing new technology that every group has to address: the technical advances and the policy around the new technology for consumers. Amazon is obviously doing a good job to help the technical side of it, but so far I think they're failing on the policy. They haven't mentioned the ability to shut off the split processing or use a different browser, and the answers to their privacy FAQs on privacy on their website are totally evasive. I think they're going to find themselves in a world of hurt if they don't start being more open about their policies, but who knows, it may end up not mattering to the masses.

colinprince 15y ago

How does SSL work with this? Wouldn't a lot of certificates get broken?

mildweed 15y ago
the SSL would have to stop in the EC2 instance where the bulk of the 'browser' is. Its then up to the Silk infrastructure to ensure the transmissions from the Fire to EC2 would be secure as well.
- thepumpkin1979 15y ago
  Sounds like a "secure" man-in-the-middle "hack"...?
mike-cardwell 15y ago
Opera Turbo is a similar service to this, but it doesn't intercept https connections. Hopefully Amazon's service will behave the same way. If not, there will be a privacy shit storm.
johnpaulett 15y ago
From the FAQ [1]: 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). Amazon Silk will facilitate a direct connection between your device and that site. Any security provided by these particular sites to their users would still exist. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html//ref=amb_link_357584342_3?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200775440&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-21-0&pf_rd_r=0TVXTAYDDY8QCBJQHQB1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=1321395082&pf_rd_i=B0051VVOB2 http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html//ref=amb...
- raganwald 15y ago
  I’d like to hear more about what “facilitate” means. Is the connection from the device right through EC2 out to the site secure, even from Amazon? Or, is the connection from the device to Amazon secure, and the connection from Amazon to the site secure, but Amazon is acting as a man-in-the-middle? Or, is the connection from the device to Amazon insecure, Amazon is acting as a man-in-the-middle, but the connection from Amazon to the site is secure? I may be having a slow neuron day, but the wording of the FAQ doesn’t seem to definitively state which of these three cases holds?

powerfulninja 15y ago

"Our back end has some of the fattest pipes you'll find" - Amazon

jeffreymcmanus 15y ago

What is the rendering engine for this? Is it Webkit or something else?

hellweaver666 15y ago
If it's anything but Webkit, I won't be testing my sites in it unless they manage to get decent penetration. Until it outranks IE6 in my stats, I won't even be giving it a look in.
cshenoy 15y ago
It's powered by a WebKit engine. Amazon Silk jobs are asking for Webkit engineers [1]. Presumably, they've modded the underlying Android browser. [1] https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/152694/job?in_iframe=1 https://us-amazon.icims.com/jobs/152694/job?in_iframe=1
- lyso 15y ago
  Interesting that you can use Webkit to build your browser but still call it "all-new".
  - jeffreymcmanus 15y ago
    So you must think there's no difference between Safari and Chrome then. Rendering engine:browser::Car:engine
    - Terretta 15y ago
      One of those pairs seems backwards.
    - rbarooah 15y ago
      He didn't say there was no difference - just that it's obviously not 'all-new'.

mvkel 15y ago

Don't do your banking on it!

VonLipwig 15y ago
This is what I was thinking, surely privacy becomes an issue if all of your data is going through what is essentially a 3rd party. Maybe secure connections bypass EC2?

ck2 15y ago

Why would Amazon be on wordpress.com? That's not for real is it?

vitobcn 15y ago
It is. It redirects to wordpress from http://www.amazon.com/silk http://www.amazon.com/silk
josefresco 15y ago
Amazon is on probably on WordPress because a lot of other high profile/high traffic blogs are hosted there as well.
- ck2 15y ago
  Except Amazon's CDN and hosting resources dwarfs wordpress.com I mean they aren't even using an amazon subdomain or their own domain - it all looks like an afterthought someone had this week "oh yeah we should have a blog, where can I set one up in a few minutes".
  - ceejayoz 15y ago
    Their CDN and hosting resources may dwarf WordPress.com, but WordPress.com's main competency is keeping high-traffic blogs up and running nicely. There's no reason for Amazon to move into the blog hosting business, especially when you can get a custom domain and design on WP.com.
tmcw 15y ago
2nd this: for a big product rollout, this site URL presence & 'blog design' is so amateurish it feels like a phishing or SEO attack.
- josefresco 15y ago
  The smart people at http://automattic.com/ http://automattic.com/ might take umbrage with your classification of their services.

johnbender 15y ago

For those of us working on mobile browsers this means a whole new set of implementation quirks we have to deal with even without the server side assist they are including. Even if they choose webkit as the rendering engine god knows what the event system will behave like.

zbowling 15y ago

So... from the sounds of it... they rebuilt what Opera Mobile does and what RIM does with Blackberry? They offload some of the compositing and some of the fetching and asset flattening server side, and then serve up to the device with custom protocol the pre-rendered flattened data anything that can be done server side. That is exactly the same way those other accelerator products already work for mobile. While it's a nice design, it's been done. The limitations and issues are well know as well, like having trouble with private intranet sites and VPNs or that because all the requests come from a few centralized IPs, geoip doesn't offer any benefit (GEOIP is a hack anyways but sites use it and users get confused when their pages think they are where ever some colo is). It also creates a single point of failure which, pedantically, is counter to the design of the internet. I was a little inflamed by the video's first statement that browsers have been built pretty much the same as they were since the beginning without many innovations. Sounds like marketing spin. I can name several notable amazing advancements in browser design since the days of WordWideWeb at CERN and Mosaic. A good number of amazing achievements around security for sure. Also, on top of that, you know what happens when Silk touches Fire? It's not pretty.

icefox 15y ago
(personal opinion, not opinion of my employeer rim) The old Blackberry Java browser was split and had tons of logic in the cloud to compensate for the fact that networks were beyond slow and devices had no extra cpu and very little ram and it did make a huge difference. It feels like RIM bet big that networks were always going to be slow and cpu's wouldn't be that fast and then came along the iphone. These days networks are much faster and there are cell phone with dual core cpu's and GB's of ram. Just imagine what we will have next year! So it is all a trade off. Is putting resources into developing this hybrid browser worth more than developing something else and just waiting 12 months for faster network/devices? Also while they don't say it on that page for the curious Amazon silk is using WebKit (from the jobs page).
- staktrace 15y ago
  Agreed. The most interesting part of the announcement is the mention of dynamically selecting which components of the browser run on the server and which run on the client. I wanted to get more details on that but can't find much. I'm interested in how they carved up WebKit and the interfaces between the different modules that might get serialized over the air.

mysmysery 15y ago

I think this may be much more than Operas method. Note that it includes formatting, layout and display. This makes me think they essentially run a clone of the browser on ec2 and could literally swap in the completed Dom, and layout. Or even a a memory diff. Having a persistent connection would also allow local events (clicks etc) to be sent back to mirror the state as you interact with the page.

rmccue 15y ago

I wonder, in terms of having many connections, could the same thing be done by a HTTP -> SPDY gateway? It saves having a multitude of connections for a single request, and also is more compressed.

ctcherry 15y ago
I think that is exactly what the Silk cloud is doing: http://aws.amazon.com/amazonsilk-jobs/ http://aws.amazon.com/amazonsilk-jobs/
- rmccue 15y ago
  Aha! That's awesome. Apart from that, it seems like it's normal optimisation techniques (compressing/resizing images, etc).

smoyer 15y ago

Hmmm ... if they can reformat a 3MB JPEG to a 50KB JPEG on-the-fly, then they can also replace the ad that might have been placed on a site by the owner with one of their choosing. It would be interesting to see if there's a difference in click-through rates between Silk's user-agent and a traditional web browser.

Permit 15y ago
ISPs have been able to do this for years. It doesn't really happen because the outrage would be deafening.
ConstantineXVI 15y ago
Modifying content in-flight would raise all sorts of nice legal issues. Copyright infringement would be the most obvious one.

aforty 15y ago

This is way more interesting than a rebranded Android tablet.

qjz 15y ago

So, a man-in-the-middle attack is a feature when Amazon is the middleman?

nextparadigms 15y ago
How "safe" is a browser like this when you want to login to websites? Could they get your passwords if you log to say Gmail through it?
- qjz 15y ago
  Even if they disable the MITM attack against SSL, or the conventional proxy, or the caching, the fact that browser internals can be shifted to their servers means they can get anything they want from your browsing session, including cookies and keystrokes.
  - nextparadigms 15y ago
    Great, so if this thing becomes popular, the Government will be able to verify all that data and passwords at will, with just one phone call, like it happened with Wikileaks.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

niyazpk 15y ago

Here is a screenshot from 1:58 in the video: http://i.imgur.com/jcVOT.png http://i.imgur.com/jcVOT.png (If this is any indicator of the actual product), it says that the whole JavaScript processing will be done on the server.

jannes 15y ago
No, it is dynamic. In the video these sliders are actually moving. (And not static, as your image would suggest) The article explains it like this: All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely.

DanWaterworth 15y ago

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that ideally this kind of thing should be done by website owners rather than amazon?

wmf 15y ago
Webmasters and developers of server-side software are extremely lazy, so that just isn't going to happen. Also, that would require standardization which has a pretty high cost.
- DanWaterworth 15y ago
  But not so lazy that they couldn't install turn-key server software or a proxy that would do it for them. Much of it wouldn't necessarily require new standards, it could work using existing technology. For the parts of it that would require new standards, provided there is a proven reduction in latency, it seems like the win would more than make up for the expense of making a new standard.

tomlin 15y ago

The Age of The Terminal, Year One

nooneelse 15y ago
Shouldn't you say The Second Age of The Terminal, Year One?
- tomlin 15y ago
  You're right. Maybe this time it'll stick? :D

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

JeffL 15y ago

Does it seem like Amazon is solving yesterdays problem instead of futures? With the speed of CPU's doubling every 18 months and the amount of bandwidth increasing by 50% annually, the accelerating growth of CPU's and bandwidth will leave this sort of client-server architecture behind. It's only a matter of time.

JeffL 15y ago

Does it seem like Amazon is solving yesterdays problem instead of the futures? With the speed of CPU's doubling every 18 months and the amount of bandwidth increasing by 50% annually, the accelerating growth of CPU's and bandwidth will leave this sort of client-server architecture behind. It's only a matter of time.

baddox 15y ago
The fastest mobile phones (and even tablets) are still significantly less powerful than a netbook. Amazon's own devices will probably have even weaker CPUs than cutting edge mobile devices simply because the price point.
Alex3917 15y ago
IIRC US bandwidth is increasing roughly 10% per year. I'm pretty sure it's some private company that does these metrics though, as I think this is the only thing the government releases: http://www.fcc.gov/measuring-broadband-america http://www.fcc.gov/measuring-broadband-america I forget the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I just remember it being really difficult to actually find the statistic. But the takeaway is that although we are theoretically #27 in terms of broadband speed, our actual broadband speeds aren't that much lower than in other countries. edit: http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ http://www.akamai.com/stateoftheinternet/ The Akamai report here is probably the most credible source. I remember there being one other report that covered this info, but I can't find it right now.
bdickason 15y ago
Is that bandwidth figure representative of most Americans or worldwide? We have 25 people at our company in NYC, for example, and only one of them has a connection faster than your typical Time Warner cable line.
ceejayoz 15y ago
If the past is any indicator, increases in CPU and bandwidth will be followed by increases in CPU and bandwidth usage.
- 15y ago

will_critchlow 15y ago

SEOmoz have been seeing extreme volatility in EC2 spot pricing - could this have been related to pre-release testing of Silk? http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/09/amazon-ec2-spot-request-volatility-hits-1000hour/ http://devblog.seomoz.org/2011/09/amazon-ec2-spot-request-vo...

wmf 15y ago
One would hope that Amazon is smart enough not to over-pay for their own cloud. (The idea that the spot price is allowed to exceed the regular price is also curious.)
- will_critchlow 15y ago
  I wonder if they jacked up the spot price to clear out some system capacity for a big test...
zmmmmm 15y ago
As a kind of side point, I find it kind of interesting that Amazon is putting the EC2 brand front and center in this. You'd have to think it would be kind of surprising if they have really built it on exactly the same cloud that they are renting to 3rd parties - but that's certainly the way they are portraying it. It seems like they are almost trying to advertise EC2 to geeks as much as they are the Silk browser.
- bostonvaulter2 15y ago
  I think Amazon.com runs on EC2 as well.

ChuckMcM 15y ago

This suggests to me an interesting idea. Lets say you used the CSS media tag to include style sheets for 'e-ink', then if such a style existed you could 'send this to my kindle'. A sort of instapaper meets Kindle Publishing. Amazon could pull something like that off, it would be useful to have a wordpress template that included the e-ink stylesheet.

pornel 15y ago
There are media queries for monochromatic screens. http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/#monochrome http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/#monochrome (although I wouldn't expect them to actually support this properly)

mcantelon 15y ago

SSL MITM FTW.

bengl3rt 15y ago

The best news about this in my opinion is that websites can no longer block EC2 IPs if they want to work properly on the Kindle Fire... between this and free inbound bandwidth (now we know why they made that happen in the first place), scraping just got a lot easier.

suyash 15y ago

How good is HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript support?

rmason 15y ago

Most tablet makers would kill to have this much developer interest. I'm fascinated by Silk and have wasted the better part of the day trying to figure out exactly what they're doing. Here's an independent description of Silk behind the scenes: http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-adds-new-twist-to-old-idea/ http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/09/amazons-silk-web-browser-ad... I am hoping that Amazon gets a developers guide up soon that fills in more of the gaps. Already on EC2 and I want to start experimenting.

naner 15y ago

Google also has a massive network of distributed servers and a couple browsers. I wonder if they'll start doing this for the Android browser and maybe even as an option for faster browsing on Chome.

sundar22in 15y ago

Why do you need a car which goes at 300 KM/hr when you drive at 50 KM/hr all the time, and don't have any issue with speed? When it comes to web browsing most of us have very good speed for browsing, then why do we need to speed up the browsing?

zmmmmm 15y ago

While I think the idea is brilliant - do as much precomputation and rendering and content consolidation in the cloud as you can - the strange thing to me is that all this stuff is really mainly a problem for browsing over cell networks while the Fire itself only supports Wifi. It kind of hints to me that there is a 3G Fire coming, they just aren't able to release it yet ...

commanda 15y ago

I'm not a front end developer, but it seems to me that pre-evaluation of javascript, or even compiling the js into byte code, would be something that front end developers would want to try in order to speed up their own users' experience of their site. Is there anything that the cloud part of Silk is doing that can be applied to websites in general, regardless of what browser is doing the rendering? Or is this optimization uniquely possible because Amazon controls the browser itself?

joshfraser 15y ago
there's no good way to compile to JS byte code, but pre-evaluation of JS is certainly possible and a worthwhile effort

kellishaver 15y ago

It would be really interesting if they could integrate some form of parental controls along with this whole caching/prefetching/data crunching process. Say you logged into your Amazon account and set the rating level for content available in Fire and then Amazon's servers would block your kid from accessing freepr0n4all.com. You could add exceptions, specific sites to block, etc. and there would be a known, ever-evolving database of "unsafe" sites by rating. The ability to filter content in a mobile browser isn't something that exists as of yet, I don't believe. If I could do this, I'd buy one for my 9yr old today. Of course, this could then be combined with other tools to "lock down" the fire, e.g. disabling the ability to exit "cloud mode" and thus bypass the filters, password protection for app/movie purchases, like iOS parental controls do, and so on.

Cushman 15y ago
Honest question from someone who grew up in the era of web content controls: Do you really think you -- or any of us -- have the technical capability to stop another person from seeing something on the Internet if they want to? It makes sense to try to help a young child keep from accidentally stumbling across that kind of crap, but I'm highly skeptical of the idea that you can prevent your child from looking at porn full stop-- or would really want to.
- kellishaver 15y ago
  No, not at all. I'm going with (hopefully) good parenting and crossing my fingers on that one. ;) It's preventing the "accidentally wandering into questionable content" that I'm interested in, in search results, etc. I'm not so much even worried about protecting her from the "questionable content" because I think that's something she needs to learn to deal with (though we do of course have rules about what is and isn't allowed). I just don't want her stumbling across it on a tablet in her bedroom, where we won't notice and can't offer guidance or discussion. We have a computer in the living room that she uses for internet access and we don't have any filtering software, etc. on it. It's just out in the open, so generally supervised.
  - 15y ago

6ren 15y ago

So it's OnLive for webpages; putting the client-side on the server-side. Well, half (or a dynamically allocated proportion) anyway. But compositing dozens of network fetches from the same cloud, centrally caching the rest, and predictive pre-fetch are big wins. The endless traipsing back-and-forth is frustrating even on the desktop. These aren't new ideas, but if Amazon implements them to deliver a better experience, users won't care - and neither will you. A sad truth for pioneers. Also gives Amazon a competitive advantage: host all your stuff with us, users will love you (google's experiments showed that even fraction-of-a-second latency loses users.) EDIT but... amazon.com is one of the slowest websites on the internet for me, and I'd expect them to be doing all of the above on their own site...

dfc 15y ago

I can not believe he used the word "decentralized" to describe silk in the video explanation.

budgi3 15y ago
why?
- dfc 15y ago
  Why? Because the Amazon and specifically the AUC lies at the center of the whole architecture.