Kindle Fire Free Web Browsing

The new Kindle Fire allows free web browsing through Wi-Fi connection (as with all Wi-Fi devices) but it does NOT have a 3G connection. Most devices are straight forward to explain and get a handle on, but with the introduction of the Kindle Fire and the Amazon Silk browser getting the internet to your mobile device has entered a new era. Most of the time we are more than happy to remain ignorant about how the information gets to us, but with Amazon Silk you will notice a massive difference in your traditional tablet browsing experience. We explain what having a browser like Amazon Silk in the Kindle Fire means for you.

1 – What is Amazon Silk?
Amazon Silk is a type of browser, like Firefox, internet Explorer or Chrome. It is a platform that allows you to access the world wide web, in Silks case it is currently specific to the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, but I would imagine that it will soon be available on all internet capable Amazon Kindle products. The main feature of Amazon Silk is that it integrates with the Amazon Cloud for a faster and more personal user experience.

2 – What is the Amazon Cloud?
If you can imagine a city in the sky with businesses and storage units then you have just imagined the Cloud. There are thousands of these clouds in cyberspace and while most people use them for storing everything from music to movies and photos entire multimillion dollar businesses are also controlled from them. Webservers and infrastructure are often a feature of the cloud and along with Amazon Google also are a major player who use the Cloud model.

3 – What Difference Does the Cloud Make?

Most devices that connect to the internet require a massive amount of energy to do so. Everytime that you want to open a new tab, look up a new site or check your hotmail account takes a lot of power and time. Often this means that your device needs a powerful processor. When Amazon Silk is used as the browser all the heavy lifting is done by the cloud so that the kindle just has to present you with your requested action. Much like a cable box does all the work and you TV just shows you the picture. In this case the cloud would be the Cable box.

Using the Cloud also means that you can start to get intelligent browsers that actually learn from your requests. When you go to Amazon and do a search you also get results like ‘recommended for’, ‘recent searches’ and ‘other people bought’. This is an example of intelligent learning browser, except Amazon Silk will apply it to your Kindle Fire. This means that it will remember pages that you have loaded and store them in a cache so when you go back to them it will load them faster, in many cases it can even learn from your browsing habits and have the next page al loaded for you.

4 – Can I use multiple Tabs and Bookmark just like a normal browser?
Yes you can

5 – Does Amazon Silk Support Adobe Flash
Yes it does

6 – What About Privacy?
The Cloud caches pages when you use Amazon Silk, so a certain amount of your preferences and information is saved. Some addresses may also be saved when technical issues arise and Amazon Silk will use these as a part of the diagnostic process. However as a rule according to the Amazon Silk terms and Conditions no information is stored for longer than 30 days.

7 – Do I have to use the Cloud?
No, you can switch off the ‘cloud’ mode, however this will mean that your Kindle Fire will have to do all the processing itself and will invariably be a lot slower to use for browsing.

8 – Is Amazon Silk available for all devices?
At this stage Silk is only available as the browser for the Kindle Fire.