Amazon’s Silk browser that made its debut yesterday at the announcement of the Fire tablet surprised a lot of people (despite the fact that Opera has been doing it for some time already). But just in case you weren’t up to speed about Amazon’s Silk browser, whenever you use it to visit a website, it gets sent to Amazon’s server, processed, and compressed before it gets delivered to you, thus reducing the bandwidth required to load pages, and speeding up the overall browsing experience.
While it’s available on the Kindle Fire tablet, recent signs seem to point towards the browser making an appearance on desktop computers. Amazon has been reported to have purchased domain names like “amazonsilkformac.com” and “amazonsilkforpc.com” which hint at a Mac OS/Windows release – but it could also just be for protection in the future. Another hint would be in the fine print of Amazon Fire’s privacy policy. Here’s the excerpt of the policy that suggests it:
If you use Amazon Silk on a Kindle device, your device will automatically send Amazon Silk crash reports to Amazon. You may choose to send these reports when using Amazon Silk on other devices. Crash reports help us diagnose problems with the browser and improve its performance.
While these clues don’t confirm anything, they sure do suggest that Amazon might have plans to bring the browser over to the competitive desktop market. Do you think Amazon’s Silk browser would fare well against the big boys?