One of the touted features of the new kindle fire is its 'silk' browser. It claims that it boosts the performance of the browser by routing the traffic through the amazon cloud where some of the pre-processing is done. Also webpage caching on the amazon cloud would improve the response times of websites. All of it looks good in theory. What about the reality ?
Anandtech.com did a indepth benchmark on the performance of the browser. The results say that browser does not live up to its claims. Talking about the good things first, the bandwidth requirements will reduce. Instead of making request to different sites and processing the raw data, the browser will make reqeust only to the amazon cloud. It will get back pre-processed data which is lean and mean. This is definitely an advantage for the mobile world as it will keep the data plan bills in check.
But what about the performance ? It does not improve a lot. In some cases, it will perform even worse. The browser has an option to turn on/off the feature of routing the web traffic via amazon cloud (accelerated page loading). On an average, it turns out that the page loads slower when the feature is on. Funny!. Hopefully amazon will improve this down the line.
Now let us put an evil hat. Do you smell some conspiracy ?. Why would amazon go through such a task of routing you web traffic via its cloud ? Just because amazon loves you so much and cares so much about your browsing speed ? May be it does. But will it do this for free ? May be not. So, what is their incentive ? If you did not guess it yet, its all your browsing data. Now, amazon knows what sites you browse and your likes/dislikes. It knows you!.
