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.

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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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