One of the selling points for Amazon’s Kindle Fire is supposed to be its Silk browser with embedded web acceleration capabilities. However, new data suggests Amazon’s claims of a better browsing experience are overstated. Google employee Steve Souders tested the performance of Silk on the Fire and compared it to web browsing on other tablets. Souders can’t be considered an unbiased observer given Google’s own interest in web acceleration technologies, but his findings are still interesting. According to Souders (and reported by ReadWriteWeb), Safari on the iPad 2 loaded pages faster in most cases than Silk on the Kindle tablet did. The Galaxy Tab performed better than the Fire with three out of eleven pages tested.
Part of the issue with Silk is that it requires content to be routed through Amazon’s servers in order for the company to perform its acceleration magic. That’s great for content already hosted on Amazon’s cloud, but (as I understand it) it means an extra step for content originally hosted elsewhere. In addition, as one commenter points out on Souder’s post, websites that already use serious content delivery network services have maxed out acceleration potential at the network level and won’t see improvement on Amazon’s network. Despite public perception, the Amazon cloud can’t compete from a distribution perspective with the networks operated by the major global CDN players.
Souders does make clear that he expects Silk to continue to improve. He says Amazon hasn’t optimized everything yet on its acceleration platform, and certain obvious optimizations, like concatenating scripts, are likely to roll out in the near future. In the meantime, Kindle browsing appears to work better with Silk acceleration turned off than with Silk acceleration turned on. Keep that in mind if you plan to wrap up a Kindle Fire for someone this holiday season.
