Amazon Silk

Motivation:

Silk was developed to divide processing between the client (Kindle Fire) and Amazon’s cloud system.  The goal was to create a browser that allowed for faster website loading through preprocessing, traffic patterns, and predictive algorithms to improve the users browsing experience while using Kindle Fire.

Main Points:

• Users are able to choose which acceleration techniques are used: 

• Accelerate Page Loading – by default Silk accelerates loading by routing some connections through the cloud.

• Instant Page Loads – predictive loading to speed up page load times

• Experimental Streaming Viewer (ESV) – lets users watch Flash content on supported websites.

• The main purpose of this development guide is more of a “best practices” in modern website design to make sites accessible on touch-screen devices while utilizing HTML5 and CSS3, than it is an informational document about Amazon Silk.

Trade-offs/Influence/Comments:

• In focusing the document on developers, the guide does not go into technical detail on the ways in which Amazon Silk is accelerating website loading and instead keeps the descriptions brief and at a high level before moving quickly into their guide for developers.

• Amazon has created this development guide with the goal that developers will make websites compatible with Silk.

•  This guide then claims their suggestions to be methods of correct web site development that should be followed regardless of a designer’s expectation of a client using Silk and more because it is in a designer’s best interest to make a website that can be viewed and accessed correctly regardless of the browser and device.

• Some issues that are brought up specifically with Silk is how to obtain a client IP address when browsing is routed through a remote proxy and that it can be found in the X-Forwarded-For request header. 

This is a very high level document and covers what could be considered general knowledge of the best practices for creating dynamic websites with proper usage of HTML5 and CSS3 with some small comments on functionality checks to perform to determine fall backs when working with different browsers, and Silk specifically.  With this in mind, it is hard to critique as it isn't an in depth article on the cloud offloading decision process, predictive loading, or ESV mentioned at the beginning of the guide.