Amazon “fires” the first shot, but it’s not aiming for Apple
While most people walked away from today’s Kindle annoucements thinking this was Amazon starting a war with Apple and the iPad, there was a little part of the annoucments that suggest they may have a different target in mind
Turns like amazon had a little trick up its sleave that it showed everyone at todays much anticipated Tablet annoucement. Amazon Silk is a web-kit based browser for their new Kindle Fire tablet. The big difference with this browser is that it works with amazons cloud infrastructure to speed up the rendering of web pages.
This sounded really revolutionary at first but the more and more I think about it its really not much different that what google page speed service or cloud flare are already doing, except flipping it around a bit and removes the control this caching away from the web developers.
Don’t get me wrong, I am excited for this innovation and I am glad Amazon is trying to push the limits of how mobile web browsing works. But as Gruber mentioned, if this takes off this would give Amazon a gold-mine of data (even in aggregate) about peoples browsing history an habits and as Chris Espinosa puts out them in a position were they could really take on google in a whole new way, using what started out as android code.
Big day for amazon..
