OK, here’s the good stuff about the new Silk Web browser, which Amazon will be embedding in its new Amazon Kindle Fire tablets: From all reports it makes Web-browsing amazing fast on relatively low-end hardware. The bad news? It does it by watching all, and I mean all, of your Web activity through Amazon’s cloud-based Amazon Web Services.
You don’t have to take my word for it. Amazon states that, “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.”
And to think I was worried because Facebook was tracking you on the Web whenever you were on a site with a Facebook like button on it! That, while sneaky and underhanded, was nothing. When you’ll be using your Kindle Fire’s Silk Web browser everything you do on the Web will be made part of your permanent record.