Kindle Fire's browser performance

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!.

How does Firefox make money ?

Firefox makes money from the in-built search bar in the browser. It gets paid for every sponsored link displayed in the search results when the search bar in the browser is used. See the second question in this link for confirmation. I am bit surprised to see that it made around $50 million in 2005 from this. Also see the blog of chairman of mozilla about 2008 financial results. The revenues are around $80million.

They really deserve it. It is really good business revenue model by being open source at the same time. No wonder how they managed to continuously come up with nice products and features. On the other hand, I appreciate Wikipedia also a lot. It has a very small team which manages the infrastucture. The organization is run entirely on donations. But I sometimes feel pity when they request for money. I could easily make $100 million a year if they place one ad per page. I appreciate their noble intentions.

Today I installed firefox 3.6 after spending a long time with my 3.0. I feel that it had lot of improvements especially the speed. I feel that there is a noticeable difference in the speed. Mozilla claims that there is 3 times improvement in the speed but I cannot quantify that. The responsiveness is also better. However, its consumes 300-400MB of main memory. Overall, I liked the new 3.6 browser.