Amazon's Silk Browser Acceleration Tested: Less Bandwidth Consumed, But Slower Perfor

[afv011]

As expected, Amazon's accelerated page loading does nothing to accelerate page loads. In fact, it slows it down compared to going direct to the servers I'm trying to reach. The numbers are mirrored in my own use of the Kindle Fire. Web pages simply load slower if you have this feature enabled.

I'm left with a few questions about the cloud-side caching feature of Amazon's Silk browser. Today there are no obvious performance benefits to using the feature and even on AT&T's 3G network I didn't see an advantage. From the perspective of the end user, Silk's "cloud based" caching is not only meaningless, but it's a detriment to the overall user experience.

Surely Amazon must have done this testing internally and chose to launch the Kindle Fire with it anyway. There's a huge advantage from Amazon's perspective to millions of Kindle users browsing with it enabled: data mining. Amazon can learn a lot about the usage patterns of its users by just monitoring Silk requests to AWS servers. In theory Amazon could take this data and further optimize the browsing experience for Silk users. There are far more nefarious explanations as well that I won't dive into here.

Source

Looks like there's no point in using the feature.

[ectoplasm]

Looks like even the best case scenario, there could only be a small gain. So it does seem like a lot of trouble for either a small gain, or no gain. I wonder if there is additional motive to Amazon capturing every page you visit.

[weatherman]

I certainly haven't seen speedy results. That's why I switched to Opera - overall, the speed is the same but the experience is better.

[carld]

Originally Posted by weatherman

I certainly haven't seen speedy results. That's why I switched to Opera - overall, the speed is the same but the experience is better.

Are you using Opera Mini or Mobile? I don't have a Fire yet, but I'm definitely considering it.

If you turn off the acceleration in settings then the stock browser is as fast as Opera Mini IMO. I was using Opera Mini until I found out how to tweak the settings to get the stock browser to work the way I wanted and now I use it most of the time. I do like having Opera mini installed for some uses though. I like Opera Mini's bookmarks better than the typically unorganized Silk bookmarks. Not sure why Amazon insists on listing bookmarks, books, apps, etc. in such a cluttered and unorganizable way?!?

[hn333]

The more you use it the faster it gets. I've been using it and haven't noticed any slow downs.