Kindle Fire uses a new Silk web browser to boost efficiency

Amazon’s new Kindle Fire tablet, unveiled today, runs a customized version of Google’s Android mobile operating system that relies heavily on an Amazon-produced web browser called Silk.

With Silk, Amazon is focusing on speed as a key selling point of the Kindle Fire. The company calls Silk a “split browser,” because half of the browsing work is done by Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) to speed up efficiency when using the web via Kindle Fire.

In addition to optimizing websites for the Kindle Fire’s screen size, resolution and such, Silk learns uses a person’s behavior patterns to pre-load frequently visited pages. So for example, if you visit about 3 of 5 websites every weekday morning, Silk will pre-load all five of those pages to make the web browsing experience faster and more enjoyable.

The process is a lot like Google’s pushing of Instant pages, which pre-loads top search results to speed up the search engine experience.

Check out the demo video from Amazon embedded below that explains how the Silk browser works.

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