Amazon Silk Browser Revealed

Amazon has launched its own browser, Amazon Silk, designed to offer an accelerated internet experience on the Amazon Kindle Fire. Split between the Kindle Fire itself and Amazon's own EC2 servers, Silk promises accelerated browsing using a combination of caching, compressing and other technologies, funneling the latest stored version of common files straight to your device.

The system also supports optimization of multimedia, so a photo that's 3MB online may be compressed down to 50KB before it's sent to your Kindle Fire. That means less bandwidth and faster load times. Amazon has also factored in some user-behavior predictive tech, that can track aggregate browsing behavior and preload the next page it thinks you'll want to see.

Meanwhile, even if Amazon's EC2 servers were to crash, the retailer says that Kindle Fire owners won't be left without internet access. Described as a "decentralized view" of the sub-systems involved, the browser on the Kindle Fire itself is capable of acting in a standalone fashion, meaning users will still be able to get their online fix (albeit at a potentially slower pace than they're used to).