CSE HTML Validator

Wow... this is indeed a significant change in how browsers work.

I thought it was very interesting.

Silk isn’t just another browser. 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.

Watch the video here:
http://amazonsilk.wordpress.com/2011/09 ... azon-silk/

Or maybe it's not as new as I thought? Some people say Opera has been doing this with "Opera Turbo".

I do know that this would probably be great on the iPad, as I have found that the iPad's browser is lacking in power. It doesn't work too well on complicated sites and can easily get bogged down. I should check to see if Opera is available on it with this type of technology.

Thanks for that link.

Kinda inevitable in hind sight!

The web / browser / Internet seems to have struck a barrier a decade ago and stopped moving much. I guess that what happens when you try to get consensus from a squabbling mob. This thing uses a different protocol, not http but spdy. Reminds of the days of Mosaic (the first? browser) it handled a lot of protocols, http, ftp, gopher, wais, whois... I think were among them. I know HTML 5 is talking about web-sockets so that is improving but using alternate protocols looks smart to me!

See http://www.cio.com.au/article/402401/amazon_new_silk_redefines_browser_tech/ for an alternate analysis.

<TongueInCheek?>Maybe a new protocol is the way to go, gives a route to emerging from the current quagmire.</TongueInCheek?>

Opera does indeed do interesting stuff. For all it's speed though I find that too many sites break when I use it.

And thanks for that link. I do find it hard to believe that "The CNN home page, for instance, is built by the browser from 53 static images, 39 dynamic images, three Flash files, 30 JavaScript files from seven different domains, 29 HTML files and seven CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files.". Really? 29 HTML files on top of all that other stuff for just the home page? If that is true, it seems quite wasteful to me. It reminds me of my main complaint with Blu-ray... the picture & sound quality is great, but I have often found it way too slow - to the point that it is irritating and not fun to use (maybe I need a new Blu-ray player?).

I'm still of the mindset where content is kind, and I find that pages can be too complex & slow, especially on mobile devices - but maybe Silk is a good answer to that.

Of course we're going to have to wait to see how people say it works. It sounds like a good system, but also sounds like it is so complex that it could have its own set of problems... and there is also the drawback of having "another link in the chain" - Amazon's cloud.

I also sat back when I saw that detail of CNN.

Having analysed a few newspaper sites (shallow analysis mostly) I can believe it. Some of the nonsense that goes into these things is really stupid. A quick glance at it tells you how it came about. Several companies sold them "bits of the solution", they haven't got much idea of how to code things up so they just pile it all on top. Tends to have truly horrible behaviour.

If a web browser misbehaves, or crashes, check first if it's a newspaper / news site. If it is think about not blaming the browser! When FF 5/6 went nuts on me it was a newspaper site that killed it!