Amazon Silk

The browser utilizes a split architecture where some of the processing is performed on Amazon's servers to improve a website's loading performance. Based on Google's open-source Chromium project, Silk uses the Blink and V8 engines for displaying webpages and executing JavaScript.

Architecture

For each page request, Silk dynamically decides whether networking, HTML parsing, and rendering tasks are handled locally or offloaded to Amazon EC2 servers.

Silk utilizes Google's SPDY protocol to enhance browsing speed. Silk provides SPDY performance benefits to websites that don’t natively support SPDY when pages are routed through Amazon’s servers. Some early reviewers found that cloud-based acceleration did not necessarily improve page loading speed, most notably on faster connections or for simpler web pages.

Privacy organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, raised concerns with Amazon passing Silk traffic through its own servers, effectively operating as an Internet service provider for users of the browser. Silk includes an option to disable Amazon's server-side processing. On July 26, 2016, it was reported that Silk prevented access to Google over HTTPS, though this issue has been resolved.

Silk operates under the user Amazon account associated with the device. To access resources from another web account, external utility apps are available, e.g. to use Chrome bookmarks from a desktop or mobile web account.