Guest post by Kurt Toelken, Senior Consultant
In November 2011, along with the release of their Kindle Fire tablet, Amazon introduced the “Silk” Web browser. What makes “Silk” unique? It is a split browser running partially on the tablet and partially in the Amazon cloud. The intent is to significantly improve the user experience on what is an ultra-thin client. Silk uses the power and speed of the Amazon Cloud to retrieve all of the components of a website simultaneously, and deliver them to Kindle Fire in a single stream. Silk is different because it learns page characteristics automatically by aggregating the results of millions of page loads, and maintaining this knowledge on the Amazon Cloud. While another browser might still be setting up a connection with the host server, Silk has already pushed content that it knows is associated with the page to Kindle Fire before the site has even instructed the browser where to find it.
Many CIOs are seeing, as a result of the growing ubiquity of tablet, smart phone and other ultra-thin clients, a demand for access to corporate systems and data on these ultra-thin clients. In many cases, these applications require significant compute and data resources beyond what the ultra-thin clients have available.
What do you think, could split browsers like “Silk” be the answer, and this is Ripe, or is this just Hype?
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