In conjunction with the new Kindle Fire tablet announced yesterday, Amazon also introduced the new Amazon Silk browser. It employs a “split browser” architecture that accelerates the power of the mobile device hardware by using the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services Cloud, resulting in a faster web browsing experience. The video provides a great overview of the new technology, how it works and its benefits.
Whilst Opera Mini and other “proxy browsers” have been using a split browser design for years now, Amazon Silk goes farther. Amongst other things it uses “pre-rendering” to predict which pages a user might want next and delivers them in advance and it employs extensive caching of common files to improve delivery response times.
However the Amazon Silk browser is designed to run on tablet computers that still offer significantly more horsepower than mass-market mobile phones. As much as we might want it to, the internet “browser” model that works so well on powerful computers running large browser software applications requesting uncompressed HTML data over wired, broadband network connections will never work well on mobile devices with limited processing power requesting page-at-a-time data over wireless mobile networks.
biNu’s technology design employs very similar concepts to the new Amazon Silk browser but takes things even a step further by performing 100% application processing on our cloud servers, which just happen to also run on Amazon Web Services.
biNu delivers internet based content with lightning-fast response times, even to low-end mobile feature phones on slow “2G” mobile networks, by:
- performing all application processing in the cloud, even down to graphics rendering, thereby minimising processing demands on a mobile device
- using a highly efficient, proprietary data protocol to deliver content to the mobile device (an average screen of text display is delivered in 1 or 2 packets of network data)
- employing extensive caching on our cloud servers as well as the mobile device to prevent anything being requested or sent more than once, even down to individual letters/characters displayed on the mobile screen
- “predictive caching” whereby screen pages are sent in advance of a user request, thereby providing instantaneous response times in many cases.
As this BI Research article points out, faster browsing leads to more engagement (more shopping in the case of Amazon), which offers even greater value in the the mobile internet world where the experience for most mobile users in the world is still woeful. There’s also amazing value in the market intelligence collected when all user activity is being channelled through a single cloud based service.
