Amazon silk using webkit and SPDY

-
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
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Please use ANSI-92 SQL Join Syntax

-
Image
Way back in 1992, a standard was published for SQL. In it, the syntax for specifying joins in SQL Database was finally standardized. This was a good thing because (for folks who've been doing this a while), trying to decode the vagaries of how various Databases handled outer joins could drive you bonkers yielding different results depending on the parse order of things in the from and where clauses. Unfortunately, some DBMS vendors took a while to adopt this standard (Oracle didn't support it until 2001), but at this point if you're using a major RDBMS and NOT using it, you're probably mired in a tradition or habit that bears changing. As an example of what I'm describing, here are some examples of what I mean. Old School (no standard syntax + implementation and evaluation of predicates varied by vendor [and query]): select * from customer, order where customer.customer = order.customerid ANSI way (agreed to standard, predicate evaluation has some rules
Read more

the myth of asynchronous JDBC

-
Image
I keep seeing people (especially in the scala/typesafe world) posting about async jdbc libraries. STOP IT! Under the current APIs, async JDBC belongs in a realm with Unicorns, Tiger Squirrels, and 8' spiders. While you might be able to move the blocking operations and queue requests and keep your "main" worker threads from blocking, jdbc is synchronous. At some point, somewhere, there's going to be a thread blocking waiting for a response. It's frustrating to see so many folks hyping this and muddying the waters. Unless you write your own client for a dbms and have a dbms that can multiplex calls over a single connection (or using some other strategy to enable this capability) db access is going to block. It's not impossible to make the calls completely async, but nobody's built it yet. Yes, I know ajdbc is taking a stab at this capability, but even IT uses a thread pool for the blocking calls (be default). Someday we'll have async databa
Read more

The difference between Scalability, Performance, Efficiency, and Concurrency explained

-
I thought I'd give some explanation of the difference between scalability, performance, Efficiency, and concurrency. To make things more accessible (and because I'm watching a cooking show on TV) I'm going to use a baking metaphor to help explain the differences. In our case, the system in question is baking cookies for consumers. Scalability, is how well something responds to adding more resources. If we can double our capacity by doubling the number of resources, we've got linear scalability. In our baking example, if we add more ingredients, we can scale to a larger number of cookies. To contrast with our other metrics, this doesn't actually increase the performance of creating a single cookie (they still take 10 minutes to bake), and the efficiency is the same (we just have more capacity). We also cannot bake more cookies in a fixed time period, but over a larger time period we can produce more cookies. Performance is how fast something can get done, u
Read more