Amazon Silk is a web browser developed by Amazon

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

 for Kindle Fire

Kindle Fire

The Kindle Fire is a tablet computer version of Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. Announced on 28 September 2011, the Kindle Fire has a color 7" multi-touch display with IPS technology and runs a forked version of Google's Android operating system. It includes access to the Amazon Appstore,...

. It uses a split architecture whereby some of the processing is performed on Amazon's servers to improve webpage loading performance. The frontend is based on the WebKit

WebKit

WebKit is a layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages. WebKit powers Google Chrome and Apple Safari and by October 2011 held over 33% of the browser market share between them. It is also used as the basis for the experimental browser included with the Amazon Kindle ebook...

 browser engine.

Architecture

For each webpage, Silk decides which browser subsystems (e.g. networking, HTML, page rendering) to run locally on the tablet and which to run remotely on the Amazon EC2 servers.

Silk uses Google's SPDY

SPDY

SPDY is a networking protocol for transporting web content developed by Google and used in accessing Google web services from their browser Google Chrome. Google promotes the protocol in the open-source project Chromium to augment the Hypertext Transfer Protocol protocol, achieving higher...

 protocol to speed up the loading of web page

Web page

A web page or webpage is a document or information resource that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a monitor or mobile device. This information is usually in HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to other web pages via hypertext...

s. Silk gives SPDY performance improvements for non-SPDY optimized websites if the pages are sent through Amazon's servers. In real-world testing, several sites have recommended disabling cloud-based acceleration to improve page loading speed.

Security

Privacy and security concerns have been raised in regards to Amazon intermediating all Internet activity through the Silk browser. However the Silk browser includes the option to turn off Amazon server-side processing.

Name

Amazon says "a thread of silk is invisible yet incredibly strong connection between two different things", and thus calls the browser Amazon Silk as it is the connection between Kindle Fire and Amazon's EC2 servers.