I wonder what Apple's response will be to this. Perhaps we'll see a "split-browser" update of (mobile) Safari soon. On the desktop I switched over to Chrome 1-2 years ago because it feels faster and it runs Google apps flawlessly. If Silk tries to do things too aggressively it might break a few applications or web pages (very tough to QA stuff like that). But probably there are speedups (e.g., smart pre-caching of popular content) that can be achieved without risk of breaking functionality and which can be exploited within a more conservative approach. Users will probably be forgiving because it's running on a $199 device with a 7" screen (
Amazon Fire). The Silk team blog is
here.
I didn't know until reading the HN comments, but apparently this type of architecture has been implemented in opera mobile and blackberry browsers. I don't think this really competes with the ipad and apple will probably react accordingly (ie by not doing much). Apple sells bmws, amazon sells fords.
ReplyDeletehttp://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3048112
I have Chrome and Flash constantly crashes on me -- "Shockwave crash," after my computer gets very very slow for a couple minutes.
ReplyDeleteThis "split" sounds like unprecedented spying possibilities for the maintainers of the backend part.
ReplyDeletetrust us ... we care :-)
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