So Amazon just introduced a new device called the Kindle Fire which is an Android based 7 inch tablet. At $199, the price makes it worth looking at. However, I think a number of people will miss perhaps an even bigger story. Amazon released Amazon Silk at the same time. Amazon Silk is a cloud based browser that does things like right size an image for your browser or complete a bunch of pre-rendering on Amazon EC2’s cloud instead of on the browser itself. This is the biggest use of the cloud I never thought of. I’m intrigued enough to go out today and buy the Kindle Fire, not because I want a tablet but because I want to see if the browser lives up to it’s billing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u7F_56WhHk&feature=player_embedded
Here’s quote from the Amazon Silk site.
We sought from the start to tap into the power and capabilities of the AWS infrastructure to overcome the limitations of typical mobile browsers. Instead of a device-siloed software application, Amazon Silk deploys a split-architecture. 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. In short, Amazon Silk extends the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of our cloud.
Look at this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=200775440
So basically Amazon establishes a encrypted connection to the secure site of your choice, let’s say your bank, decrypts it, has everything in plain text, “optimises” it, encrypts it again for you and sends it to you. You have to trust Amazon a LOT in order to use that (I don’t). This technique in hacker circles (pun intended) is also called “man in the middle attack”, but in this case, it’s probably legal, because you accepted some phrase on page 3254 of the license agreement.
Sorry Amazon, first I was quite interested in the Kindle Fire, smaller and lighter than the iPad, just ideal for just reading and surfing, but then I read about that it runs some proprietary Amazon version of Android, where you don’t have access to the marketplace and now this. Sorry, but I pass…
This sounds a lot like what the Opera mobile browsers have been doing for years, just more advanced.
The big breakthrough for Amazon is that this gives them a way to produce a low cost tablet without having to embed more expensive hardware and get into iPad territory.
Great points. You’ve now relegated part of the browser experience to Amazon. Do you trust Amazon? Is it secure? That said though, if you are really interested in your privacy, ISP’s track everything you do anyway. We just trust them and know it’s harder for them to make use of my data. Amazon can use that data though. It’ll be interesting to see what we see from them later on regarding privacy.
Pingback: Mobile Web
Pingback: Transcend 32 GB
Pingback: Web applications tools