Amazon Silk - Questions and Opportunities
TL;DR
In the wake of the Silk announcement that Amazon made as part of their Kindle Fire unveiling, I'm left with a couple of questions and pondering further opportunities this new browser might have. Does it work at all without AWS? Would Amazon consider releasing it for the desktop? We know the privacy implications are worth considering, but what about security?
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It seems that Amazon has chosen Webkit as their rendering engine, which is good news for web devs and designers. Unless they've chosen to deprecate features, the support for HTML5 is good in Webkit and fairly advanced. At any rate, it's a known quantity, so if your site is standards compliant, you might consider getting a Kindle Fire for testing but probably won't need one for development. I've seen speculation that we'll want to see if the parallel fetching and cloud-side rendering might break certain kinds of AJAX, but that remains to be seen.
What I'm more curious about is whether or not Silk will work if AWS is down, which has been known to happen now and again. Is it capable of reverting to plain vanilla HTTP requests if the connection to the mothership goes down? If so, is it fast enough to give users an acceptible experience with JavaScript rendering? Flash support has been mentioned but not emphasized. Does a Flash object benefit from the AWS rendering support? We know that Flash is a mixed bag on Android right now, often impacting battery life and device responsiveness. Has Silk solved this issue?
I'm further interested in knowing whether or not Amazon has any plans to release a version of Silk for Windows, Mac, or Android. I'm sure they've at least considered it, given that they have to be aware of the fact that Silk will turn their AWS aggregator into a flesh-driven web scraper. Amazon will have no need for spidering or search algorithms to be held close to the vest as Google does; they just have to let their users do all the work of surfing the web while letting AWS monitor what page they load and what they click on next. Of course, in the short term, Silk will help Amazon move Kindle Fires, but Jeff Bezos has to be aware that making this browser availble to laptops and smartphones would only extend their reach as your new gatekeeper to the Web. Again, Google should be deeply concerned that Amazon's long term ambitions might include usurping them as the go-to search engine.
This leads me to my curiosity about security. Just this past Monday, Oracle's MySQL website was compromised and breifly serving malware to Windows visitors in the form of a JavaScript file that downloaded and ran executables without the visitor's knowledge or permission. Google was made aware and flagged the site in their search results with warnings. But a desktop version of Silk might have taken a different approach. After flagging the site, Silk might have chosen to keep serving the site but simply not include the malicious .JS file in the result passed back to its users. Of course, Oracle would still need to clean their site and fix their vulnerability, but in this scenario, Silk visitors might have simply gone about their day with no need to worry.
Of course, that sword cuts both ways. If they become the de facto gatekeeper for a large number of browsers, Amazon might find themselves under pressure from law enforcement groups, civil lawyers, or dictatorships to simply refuse to serve certain websites. We know that AWS bowed to pressure to refuse to host Wikileaks' website. No one would object to Silk's blocking child porn, but what about a Libiyan protest site? Regardless, this new approach to browsing has many wrinkles to it that I have a feeling we're just starting to consider as potential users. The next four months should be interesting to say the least.
