Amazon unveils Cloud based web browser Amazon Silk

SEATTLE, USA: Online retail giant Amazon has announced the availability of Amazon Silk, a "split browser" architecture that accelerates the power of the mobile device hardware by using the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud (AWS).

The Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the server that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), said a press release.

"Kindle Fire introduces a revolutionary new web browser called Amazon Silk," said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. 

"We refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack and now push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud. When you use Silk - without thinking about it or doing anything explicit - you're calling on the raw computational horsepower of Amazon EC2 to accelerate your web browsing," added Bezos.

Amazon Silk

Amazon EC2 is always connected to the backbone of the internet where round-trip latency is 5 milliseconds or less to most web sites rather than the 100 milliseconds seen over wireless connections, added the release.

In addition, EC2 servers have massive computational power. On EC2, available CPU, storage, and available memory can be orders of magnitudes larger than on mobile devices.

The company claims that, Silk uses the power and speed of the EC2 server fleet to retrieve all of the components of a website and deliver them to Kindle Fire in a single, fast stream.

Traditional browsers must wait to receive the HTML file in order to begin downloading the other page assets. Silk is different because it learns these page characteristics automatically by aggregating the results of millions of page loads and maintaining this knowledge on EC2, added the release.

Silk keeps a persistent connection open to EC2 so that there is always a connection at the ready to start loading the next page, it added.

The release further added that, Silk also uses EC2 to maintain a persistent connection to the top sites on the web. This approach reduces latency that would otherwise result from constantly establishing TCP connections. Further, Silk's split architecture uses a pipelined, multiplexing protocol that can send all the content over a single connection.