Amazon Launches Silk Web Browser for Tablets

Amazon has unveiled Silk, a brand new web browser that lives both on the tablet and in the cloud.

The browser, which will be available on the Amazon Fire tablet, dramatically cuts down on load times and request times by splitting the workload between the tablet and Amazon’s EC2. This infusion of cloud computing is the secret sauce that makes the Silk browser load pages quickly.

Silk also invokes predictive technology. It utilizes machine learning to detect user behavior and predict what the user will request next.

In a demonstration at its press event in New York, Amazon loaded 53 static file images, 39 dynamic files, 30 Javascript files and three Flash files within seconds.

Amazon engineers say that they called the browser Silk because “a thread of silk is an invisible yet incredibly strong connection between two different things,” which describes the relationship between Amazon’s browser and the cloud.

Check out the video that Amazon has produced to learn more about the new cloud-based browser.