To hear Amazon tell it, the Amazon Silk browser is going to be a revolution in how mobile devices browse the web. Silk acts as an intermediary between your mobile device (the Kindle Fire) and the Internet at large. As you make a request -- go to TheAwl.com -- Silk jumps in and distributes the workload of finding, downloading, and presenting that information on the device. If you use your phone or current tablet to do that stuff, there are a bunch of servers that your gadget has to talk with in order to get the data it needs to render a page. Each step in that process, as Brett Taylor, the principal product manager for Silk explains in the video above, takes time.
"With every page request... you gotta go out and do some DNS resolution, figure out where's the origin server, issue that request, do sort of a TCP handshake, ask for the content that you want, get the acknowledgement back to you, bunch of back and forth steps to kind of boil it all down," Taylor says. "Your device is going to have go back and forth across that wireless network perhaps dozens of times. And that's all time."
With Silk, Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure takes care of a lot of those steps and serves you up just what you need. That seems like a very good idea and will reduce the strain on the Fire's resources.