Amazon's New 'Silk' Web Browser Leverages the Cloud

The internet is full of buzz today about Amazon's new Kindle Fire. The new tablet sounds impressive in many ways, but I'm particularly intrigued by the fact that Amazon will be bundling its own custom web browser, "Silk," with the Fire.

I know, "Not another browser!" you moan. Well, Silk really is different, as the Amazon guys explain in the following video:

Basically, Silk offloads a lot of the computing-intensive and bandwidth-intensive work to Amazon's EC2 "cloud computing" infrastructure. The cloud-based backend assembles and optimizes the result for rendering on the Fire, thus accelerating and enhancing the user experience. Or, in the words of the Amazon Silk Team:

We sought from the start to tap into the power and capabilities of the AWS infrastructure to overcome the limitations of typical mobile browsers. Instead of a device-siloed software application, Amazon Silk deploys a split-architecture. All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely. In short, Amazon Silk extends the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of our cloud.

Overall, this sounds a lot like Opera's Turbo technology, which always struck me as brilliant. (The Opera guys strike me as brilliant in general, actually. Must be something about Norway...)

I guess we'll see how well it actually works, come November 15th. Also: the always-excellent Ars Technica has a piece up about Silk, too.