One of the most fascinating aspects of Amazon's Kindle Fire release today was its Silk browser. Google Chrome has sold itself on its speed and Amazon is promising to take things a step further by harnessing the power of its servers.
This is a beautiful example of a company leveraging a core competency to try and revolutionize an already crowded space: the ubiquitous web browser.
While Amazon could have drawn on the many diverse browser offerings available, it chose to build its own browser and differentiate itself on speed. This can only benefit all of us web-browsers, as faster is always better in the case of loading web pages.
Silk reminds me most closely of Opera's mobile and mini browsers, which sell their ability to "Save money on data charges." Amazon does not mention saving money as a benefit and doesn't seem to depend on compression for any speed savings.
Instead, Amazon outlines the way "machine-learning" will improve the ability of Silk to predict what will be needed when, increasing the load speed of web pages. This predictive web page handling is intriguing and is based on algorithms Amazon uses to suggest items you might like when shopping. How many times have you been amazed at the quality of Amazon's suggestions? I know I have.
In fact, if Amazon begins suggesting what web page I might like to visit next, I won't have to think at all when I browse the web. It will be smooth as Silk.
1 comment:
Thank you very much for your insight into this new Amazon Table, Silk and Fire. The real innovation is in this technology they are developing to predict user experience... this has been unfortunately overshadowed with concerns about "iPad" killer instead of the real innovation. But that's cool... I can't wait to try one of these guys.
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