Amazon Silk
You will be so impressed with the Amazon Silk. It is a new kind of web browser, it has the leverage and power capabilities of the Amazon Web Services or ( AWS) cloud t0 rethink the level of performance and functionality that the browser can provide.
It seems that as each year goes by that the browser developments have progressed more in the past few years and they offer more upgrades than in the past. If Amazon thought that they could only deliver another browser they wouldn’t have bothered just creating another one like all of the others. However they have come up with something that is so exciting, that they feel that customers will be delighted in the “cloud accelerated” browser as it has such a huge potential.
With the Amazon Silk , most of the heavy lifting is shifted from the processor on your device to their powerful AWS servers. It gives you access to such lighting fast CPUs, and expansive memory, and its huge network connections allows the performance of Amazon Silk to transcend the capabilities of your local device. Because much of the intelligence of the browser is in cloud, it gives you a number of performance enhancements that become possible, including squeezing the most out of your connection. Amazon Silk had the ability to learn about traffic patterns on individual sites over time and it begins to fetch the next page that users may wish to visit.
Browsing the Web
When you first open Amazon Silk, you will see a selection of pre populated bookmarks. You can touch any of these “titles” to navigate directly to one of the bookmarked sites. As you begin to use the browser the view will become customized to display your most frequently visited sites, and allowing you to navigate to those sites faster. On the new tab screen, you also enter a web site address or search term into the location bar. Once the site you have entered finishes loading the location bar will recede from view, thus leaving more space on the screen for the content of interest.
You will also notice that the Amazon Silk interface includes top tabs. You can open multiple tabs and quickly switch between them as needed. If you would like to follow the link on your current page, but would prefer not to navigate away from the current page you can press and hold the link and select ” Open in the new tab” from the context menu.
To Open and Close Tabs
In order to open a new tab all that you need to do is to click on “+ ” sign at the top right corner of the tab bar. New tabs will always open to the right of the tab on the tab bar. You will be able to scroll between your open tabs by swiping left or right along the tab bar. In order to close the same tabs, all you need to do is touch the “x” on the right edge of the open tab, or press hold on the inactive tab and select “Close Tab” from the pop up menu.
To Zoom in and out
Amazon Silk offers the pinch and double tap gestures for zooming in and out of the particular areas of the page.
To Bookmark a Website
In the site that you wish to bookmark, select the “Menu” option from the menu bar. A menu drawer will slide up with six menu options. In the upper left corner there will be an option to add ” bookmark”. Press this option and a dialog box will appear allowing you to either select or default name on the site, or give it another name of your choosing. By selecting OK the bookmark will be added to your list. In order to manage your bookmarks, just click the bookmark icon on your lower menu bar and a new screen will come up showing each of your bookmarked sites. You can elect to view these bookmarks in a grid or list view. From this bookmark screen , you can open a site, copy the url, or delete a bookmark.
Flash Content
Amazon Silk does support Flash content.
Does Amazon Silk offer default to the mobile version of web sites?
By default, Amazon Silk will present the optimal view for the site requested. While some sites are better rendered in a mobile view, most often this, “automatic” setting will result in a desktop like experience. As an Amazon Silk user, however you may opt to change this default at any time via the Settings Screen.
Internet Browsing History
Amazon Silk temporarily logs web addresses know as uniform resource locators
(URL”S) for web pages it serves. URL’s are collected in aggregate and Amazon does not associate these URLs with your identity. URLs are stored for up to 30 days. This aggregate information helps drive Amazon Silk’s speed.
The Kindle Fire device may also send “crash reports” (information on potential technical issues)” to Amazon. These reports may contain identifiers such as IP or MAC addresses, but these are only used for purposes of technical troubleshooting and are not associated with your Amazon Silk browsing history.
Explain what data you’re aggregating and how that data enables a fast browsing experience
One example is the “Smart Push” feature, which observes page loads accross all users in aggregate. For example, Silk might notice that the last 100,000 loads of a particular web page resulted in the file logo.ping being sent to the user. In this case when the Silk backend server sees another request for that page , it will pre push the logo image to the client even before the site returns to the HTML file.
Does Amazon intent to sell this “aggregate browsing data” to third parties?
No Customer information is an important part of their business and an important driver of customer experience and future invention. They do not sell the information to others and do not have plans to do so.
Or how do I turn off cloud accelerated browsing?
You the customer have the option to turn off the feature of the cloud acceleration feature of Silk from Amazon Silk settings menu by deselecting the “Accelerate page loading” option. In that off cloud mode, web pages go directly to a user’s device rather than pass through AWS servers and the customers still enjoy a good browsing experience. You can always resume “cloud accelerated” browsing by re selecting this option via the settings screen.
Handling secure (https) connections
Amazon Silk routes secure (SSL) web page request directly from the Kindle Fire to origin servers so they don’t pass through AWS servers. As an additional security measure, Amazon Silk encrypts all web traffic between the Kindle Fire and their AWS infrastructure, even where traditional browsers would not encrypt.
Amazon Silk is only available on the Kindle Fire.
