Amazon Silk

Amazon Silk is the browser that Amazon developed for the Kindle Fire tablet computer. The browser decides the parts of the system to live locally on some devices and others live remotely on Amazon's servers. The purpose of this split browser architecture is to create a very fast user experience. Silk supports HTML5, Javascript, CSS and Flash.

Silk uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to send Web page requests for a service in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The service fetches the page from the original source and works in the form of paging, pre-processing and compressing before placing it in the cache for future use.

Silk uses the difference of Google SPDY protocol (instead of HTML) to send the requested web page from EC2 to Kindle Fire. SPDY (clear speed) is a networking protocol for transporting web content that was developed by Google to Chrome. To make the speed even better, Amazon service is associated with popular websites, which takes time to communicate.

Silk is considered a smart browser because it employs machine learning to estimate user behavior. If the user is concerned about privacy, then he can close the EC2 service and use the browser in a standard way.

According to Jon Jenkins, Silk director of software development, Amazon chose "Silk" because a thread of silk is an invisible, yet incredibly strong, there is a connection between two things. In this case, the connection is between Kindle Fire and Amazon Compute Cloud.