The latest version of Silk has improved page load speeds, improved HTML5 support, and some UI changes. Here’s what it looks like:
It also comes with a new Trending Now feature, which will direct users to popular pages around the web.
Amazon says it “alerts our customers to pages that have experienced an unusual increase in their level of traffic, usually a good indicator that the page or topic may be particularly noteworthy right now.”
Here, you can see how it appears from the New Tab page:
It also has an additional new content discovery feature called “Selected Sites,” which simply shows other sites Amazon thinks you’ll find interesting.
Amazon has just announced a software update to their Kindle Fire tablet and among other things, it improves parental controls in the realm of purchasing and access to specific content.
Version 6.3.1 now gives users the ability to password-protect their purchases – so little Timmy doesn’t deplete your bank account without your knowledge. The new version also allows parents to disallow access to certain types of content -or block their child’s access to the Silk browser altogether.
Along with the new parental controls, here’s a smattering of what else you’ll find in v.6.3.1 via Amazon:
Sharing: Easily share favorite passages and notes from books directly from Kindle Fire. Simply highlight a passage and select “Share,” add a note, and choose which social network youd like to post to. Book Extras: Powered by Shelfari, Amazon’s community of book lovers, Book Extras make it easy to see supplemental material about the book you are reading, without leaving the book. View descriptions of characters, a glossary of common terms used in the book, information on the authors and common locations referenced in the book, and more. To view Book Extras within your book, tap the bottom of the screen to bring up the options bar, tap the menu icon and select “Book Extras.” Archive of Personal Documents: Your personal documents are stored in the Amazon Cloud and available for redownload at any time from the Docs content library on your Kindle Fire. Just as with Kindle books, Whispersync automatically syncs notes, highlights and furthest page read for personal documents. Print Replica Textbooks: Students can buy thousands of print replica textbooks to read on their Kindle Fire and save up to 60% off the list price of the print textbook. Print replica textbooks maintain the rich formatting, color and layout of the print editions, with features including notes and highlights, zoom and pan, linked table of contents, real page numbers, and Whispersync of notes, highlights and furthest page read. Reading View for Amazon Silk: With Reading View on Silk, the content that you’re interested in is elevated above the clutter in a reading-optimized, single screen view (even for multi-page articles). The full page is still available in the background, allowing you to easily toggle back to a traditional view to see other interesting features on the page. Movie Rentals: The rental period for movie rentals downloaded to Kindle Fire now starts when you starts watching the movie, rather than at download. Additional Enhancements: Faster re-connect of Wi-Fi after your Kindle Fire has been asleep, and general performance enhancements.
Of course, like all updates, this one will be automatically pushed to your device in due time. If you want to manually install the update, head here to find out how.
Arachnophobia; the fear of spiders. Most people are afraid of these little guys for varying reasons; some are poisonous and some are just creepy looking. However, these 8-legged architects can build some astonishing structures using their silk.
Spider silk is a versatile material. For example, the single thread the spider uses to drop down, pull it and it stretches, but with no outside forces acting on it, it stiffens to its original state.
How does this work? You may ask, well, According to one source, during the elastic stage of the web, the proteins in spider silk are pressed into finite folded structures. So when the spider decides to drop, the structures unfurl, when the folds are gone, the proteins reconfigure into the tough structures referred to as beta-sheet nanocrystals.
Scientists performed a study to see how molecular properties impact the entire web. So, a group of researchers sought out a a basic web built by your every day casual spider. With the spider still on the web, the team hung tiny metal wires on the web to simulate an insect caught in the web. When they pulled the wires, the individual spokes of the web broke, but the other threads, acting as almost support structures, didn’t break.
The results of the experiment really show off the unique ecology of these arachnids. Spider silk is one of the most scientifically interesting natural materials. Other creatures that spin silk, such as silk worms, their silk is made to be more stretchy than anything. A spider’s silk, however, can be elastic and incredibly strong at different times.
Needless to say spider webs are incredible structures and a useful hunting tool for the creatures. The architecture and pure aesthetic beauty of the web is just an added bonus. Spiders may be creepy to you, but they sure are smart arachnids.
Amazon made a pretty big splash yesterday with the unveiling of the Kindle Fire tablet and new versions of the Kindle. What many in the industry consider to be the most interesting news of the bunch, however, was that of Silk.
Silk is Amazon’s new web browser, which is exclusive to the Kindle Fire, at least for now. It’s not just another browser though. It actually has something significantly different to bring to the table, and I will be very surprised if it’s not launched to other devices.
Amazon posted the following video explaining it:
In a nutshell, Silk makes the web browsing experience faster, because it divides the workload between the mobile hardware Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It’s explained further here.
Chester Wisniewski, a senior security advisor at Sophos put up a blog post talking about privacy concerns with Silk. He writes:
” All of your web surfing habits will transit Amazon’s cloud. If you think that Google AdWords and Facebook are watching you, this service is guaranteed to have a record of *everything* you do on the web.”
“In fact Amazon Silk’s terms and conditions notes that URLs, IP addresses and MAC addresses will be logged and can be retained for 30 days.”
That is in fact in the terms and conditions, but so is the following:
You can also choose to operate Amazon Silk in basic or “off-cloud” mode. Off-cloud mode allows web pages generally to go directly to your computer rather than pass through our servers. As such, it does not take advantage of Amazon’s cloud computing services to speed-up web content delivery.
So, it sounds like the privacy is there if you want it, but if you want to use Silk for the things that set it apart from other browsers, you should be warned of what Wisniewski is talking about.
Amazon isn’t only entering the tablet space today with the unveiling of the Kindle Fire. It’s also entering the web browser space.
The company unveiled its new browser, which will appear exclusively on the Kindle Fire. It’s called Silk. Amazon the name is inspired by the concept that “a thread of silk is an invisible yet incredibly strong connection between two different things”.
How clever.
In this case, it’s the connection between the Kindle Fire and Amazon EC2. (Elastic Compute Cloud). The browser divides the workload between the mobile hardware and EC2 with each page request, Amazon says. This is supposed to make browsing much faster.
Amazon says that on a recent day, constructing the CNN.com home page required 161 files served from 25 unique domains, and that a typical web page requires 80 files served from 13 different domains.
“Latency over wireless connections is high – on the order of 100 milliseconds round trip,” the company says in its Silk announcement. “Serving a web page requires hundreds of such round trips, only some of which can be done in parallel. In aggregate, this adds seconds to page load times.”
“We sought from the start to tap into the power and capabilities of the AWS infrastructure to overcome the limitations of typical mobile browsers,” Amazon’s Silk team says. “Instead of a device-siloed software application, Amazon Silk deploys a split-architecture. All of the browser subsystems are present on your Kindle Fire as well as on the AWS cloud computing platform. Each time you load a web page, Silk makes a dynamic decision about which of these subsystems will run locally and which will execute remotely. In short, Amazon Silk extends the boundaries of the browser, coupling the capabilities and interactivity of your local device with the massive computing power, memory, and network connectivity of our cloud.”
“We refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack and now push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud,” explains CEO Jeff Bezos. “When you use Silk – without thinking about it or doing anything explicit – you’re calling on the raw computational horsepower of Amazon EC2 to accelerate your web browsing.”
I’m guessing Google is going to have a Chrome-related response to this, as speed has been the primary focus of that browser, which continues to gain a great deal of market share momentum. Surely the the major browser players will as well.
One thing is for sure. As long as Amazon keeps the browser limited to the Kindle Fire, or even just the Kindle Family, it’s going to have a hard time getting a significant piece of the market share. They did make the Kindle platform available across many devices, however, so it would not be surprising to see them do the same with Silk.
