Amazon silk using webkit and SPDY

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After reading the recent blog post by Amazon about their "cloud enabled" browser called silk, I went into a minor panic.  I couldn't find any immediate information about the rendering engine or any technical details about what they actually doing.  After some digging I uncovered some job postings that seem to confirm they are using webkit for their rendering and are leveraging SPDYon the network protocol layer.

This is great news for developers as webkit is already well established and most of us won't be immediately impacted by SPDY (well actually, your ajax experience might be impacted, but that's another topic entirely).  All told this isn't as big a technological change at the front end and is more of a story about amazon trying to use their infrastructure to make the mobile browsing experience better.  Frankly, this is a scaled up and modernized version of what blackberry did years ago (are they still doing that?).

NOTE to Silk team -- please implement an HTML5 native datetime picker on your device that doesn't suck so everyone else will follow.  This is a sore point for the mobile webkit experience right now and recurring problem that gets solved in a variety of "not so good" ways.

Comments

Anonymous said…
http://davidbcalhoun.com/2011/new-mobile-safari-stuff-in-ios5-position-fixed-overflow-scroll-new-input-type-support-web-workers-ecmascript-5
September 28, 2011 at 7:52 PM
Hamranhansenhansen said…
I am going to ban it from my domains anyway, just like Opera Mini and any other browser that breaks HTTPS and is recording every move the user makes.

It will likely break JavaScript anyway, and I don't want users blaming the sites.
September 28, 2011 at 9:47 PM
Ben said…
@Hamranhansenhansen: Ah, someone who's website I wouldn't visit anyway...
September 29, 2011 at 4:04 AM
mz said…
@Ben: If it is truly breaking HTTPS, then that means that your credit card numbers, your logins, your private messages, etc. that are supposed to be kept encrypted, end-to-end, will be shared with a man-in-the-middle...
September 29, 2011 at 12:04 PM
Samual James said…
There are rare days when you find what you are looking for. Some of those day is today for me as i found your blog hunting some good resource of information about amazon kindle dx review. Thanks a lot.
November 24, 2011 at 4:35 AM
Unknown said…
Cloud is one of the tremendous technology that any company in this world would rely on(Salesforce Certification). Using this technology many tough tasks can be accomplished easily in no time. Your content are also explaining the same(Salesforce crm training in chennai). Thanks for sharing this in here. You are running a great blog, keep up this good work.
September 26, 2015 at 4:37 AM
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