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Amazon Silk

Revolutionary Cloud-Accelerated "Split Browser"

Modern websites are complex. A typical web page requires 80 files served from 13 different domains. This takes a regular browser hundreds of round trips, and adds to page load times.

Amazon Silk is different in a radical new way. We've rebuilt the browser software to push pieces of the computation into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This lets Silk do more work, more quickly, and all at once. We call this "split browser" architecture. Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Shorter Transit Times

Amazon EC2 is always connected to the backbone of the Internet where round-trip latency is shorter than what’s typical over wireless connections. Because AWS also has relationships with major internet service providers, and many top sites are hosted on EC2, many web requests will never leave the extended infrastructure of AWS, reducing transit times to only a few milliseconds.

Computing Power in the Cloud

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.

Page Indexes & Machine Learning

As Silk serves up millions of page views every day, it learns more about the sites and pages it renders, and by observing aggregate traffic patterns, it can infer where users might go next. For example, Silk might observe that 85 percent of visitors to a leading news site click on that site’s top headline. With that knowledge, the browser makes intelligent decisions about pre-pushing popular content to the Kindle Fire, making commonly-visited pages available even faster.