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Amazon today announced a new Kindle, the Kindle Fire, which is a full-color tablet with access to apps and streaming content. The big news for web developers, though, is the Silk cloud-based web browser they have developed and installed on it. According to Amazon, it uses a "split-architecture" in which the browser will make a decision whether to render a website on the device or remotely in the cloud.

No word yet on the rendering engine used in the browser, but their video contains some interesting information about the browser.

First, it's named Silk due to the single very strong connection between the browser and the cloud. The cloud serves as a virtually unlimited browser cache.

They talk a lot in the video about reducing TCP latency when making requests for assets. It's true -- the typical web page loads a ton of content, which requires making many, many HTTP requests to potentially many different servers. A substantial amount of the time a user spends waiting for a page to render is actually caused by waiting for the page's assets to download. From my understanding of this video, and the way they describe the name "silk," I wonder if the browser will create a small number of TCP connections to cloud servers, and then pull down multiple assets (javascript, images, etc.) through each connection. TCP connections take some time to establish and optimize, and considering the browser needs to do this 80 times per page on average (according to the video), this would be a dramatic improvement in mobile browser performance if true.

The rendering engine evidently has a few more tricks up its sleeve, including the ability to detect the next page based on aggregated user activity (privacy advocates will wonder if it is possible to disable this capability) and pre-cache it. The video also mentions that the cloud can optimize content delivery, which I suspect means that it will detect and scale down large images and compress HTML, CSS and javascript. The image scaling and compression capability makes me wonder if Silk will become available on other types of devices -- and if Amazon intends to release other versions of Kindle with different screen sizes and resolutions.

News from around the web on the new Kindle Fire and Silk: