The Amazon Silk Browser

Although Amazon has done an excellent job in making the Fire's home screen nice and responsive (read: fully GPU accelerated via a backing store), the browser does not receive the same treatment.

Rightware BrowserMark

SunSpider Javascript Benchmark 0.9.1

Rendering (including JavaScript) performance is reasonable on the Fire, but scrolling down web pages is clearly sub 30 fps. The choppiness is something that individual Android partners have addressed in their own custom browsers (e.g. Samsung in the Galaxy S 2), however it appears that Amazon has not done the same. As a result the browsing experience on the Kindle Fire feels distinctly 2010 rather than modern day Android, particularly compared to the strides Google has made in Honeycomb and (presumably) Ice Cream Sandwich. The Vellamo flinger tests support our comments about scrolling performance:

Vellamo - Ocean Flinger

Vellamo - Image Flinger

Vellamo - Text Flinger

I don't doubt that Amazon will eventually enable a fully GPU accelerated browser at some point in the future, its failure to do so today is irksome. The missing feature is particularly upsetting in light of another, fairly large customization to the browsing experience that Amazon has chosen to introduce instead: cloud based caching.

If there's one thing I'm not particularly happy about with the Kindle Fire it's the web browser. I've already explained that Amazon didn't bother to deliver the smooth, GPU accelerated experience we've come to expect from Samsung's SGS2 browser, Honeycomb or iOS. Web page loading performance is reasonable but the actual browsing experience suffers. What may have been understandable a year ago is no longer the case today, particularly with Ice Cream Sandwich weeks if not days away from a US release.

My biggest issues have nothing to do with performance however, they stem from the cloud accelerated browsing features of Silk. I've already written about much of this publicly but I'll start with a quick recap.

Amazon insists that the browser is an aging limitation on the overall mobile experience. A single page load can require negotiating connections with dozens of servers, followed by downloading megabytes of content, none of which are optimized for mobile devices. Why assume that all page elements are optimally compressed for delivery to a sub-1080p display?

Amazon feels the best way to address delivering the desktop web to mobile devices is via its own cloud services. With the Silk browser's "accelerated page loading" feature enabled, any website you load is proxied through Amazon's AWS servers. The Silk browser then only has to deal with a single host that all content is funneled through:

With all content filtered through Amazon's servers there are two things that can happen: 1) Amazon can learn a lot about how Silk users browse the web and 2) Amazon can optimize the content within its cloud before getting to you.

Let's talk about the second advantage. Images and data can be (re)compressed before they get to you and Amazon can prefetch additional pages based on what it thinks you'll request next. On a greater scale, Amazon can reduce the bandwidth load to site owners by serving already cached data from its AWS cloud rather than re-requesting the elements from the original servers. For one person accessing a site there are no savings, but with thousands of people pulling the same page the benefit is clear. There's a lot of good that can come from Silk's page loading optimizations, unfortunately almost none of it is realized today.

I thought it odd that Amazon would debut cloud-based caching on a device that was WiFi only. Saving bandwidth is really important on cellular connections that are either low performance or limited by data use caps (or both). Neither of these things applies to the Kindle Fire in its state today. It's no surprise that using Silk with accelerated page loading enabled offers no real benefits on the Kindle Fire.

I detailed all of my testing procedures in a separate piece last week, but here are the relevant excerpts:

I started out by doing some raw web page loading tests. I picked three web pages: AnandTech.com, Engadget.com and NYTimes.com. I loaded each one 10 times in a row and averaged all of the run times. I did the same with and without the Silk browser's accelerated page loading feature enabled (cloud caching).

The results are below:

Kindle Fire - Accelerated Page Loading Test

As expected, Amazon's accelerated page loading does nothing to accelerate page loads. In fact, it slows it down compared to going direct to the servers I'm trying to reach. The numbers are mirrored in my own use of the Kindle Fire. Web pages simply load slower if you have this feature enabled.

Amazon also argues that it's enable to improve performance by optimizing content for the device you're viewing it on. In other words, Amazon is able to perform server side compression of things like images to deliver a seemingly lossless reduction in file size and thus improve performance. This claim was a little more difficult to investigate as requesting a full uncompressed JPG didn't seem to go through Amazon's compression routine. Instead I sniffed the Kindle Fire's traffic on my network and looked at total bytes transferred for a handful of page requests. This time I looked at the same three websites from earlier (AT, Engadget, NYTimes) but also added CNN.com for something a bit more mainstream, and Reddit.com for something a bit more awesome (and text heavy).

To deal with the fact that these are live websites with ever changing content I ran all of the tests back to back, ensuring that the actual website content didn't change between runs. I also ran each test at least 5 times to deal with any differences in ads that loaded. I cleared the cache between each run to always request data from Amazon's servers. The results were remarkably consistent. Once again, the data is below:

Kindle Fire - Accelerated Page Loading Bandwidth

The average compression ratio for these test web pages through Amazon's servers was 0.891. Everything seemed to reduce fairly predictably, the exception being CNN.com which saw a compression ratio of 0.801. It's possible that CNN's content is unnecessarily large and could stand for some server side optimization of its own. It's interesting that even Reddit, a text heavy site, was able to see some benefits from Amazon's accelerated page loading feature.

It's worth noting the average KB saved by enabling accelerated page loading is only 174KB. That amounts to just under 10% of the 1758KB average page size in this test. If you're severely limited by bandwidth caps, these savings might come in handy but otherwise they're not large enough to be noticeable.

If the amount of data transferred is smaller, but the pages take longer to load this can only mean one thing: the transfer rates are slower from Amazon. Indeed they are:

Kindle Fire - Accelerated Page Loading - Download Speed

When loading NYTimes.com I averaged (again, over five runs, cache cleared between each one) 1.93Mbps with accelerated page loading disabled and 1.26Mbps with the feature enabled.

Curious to test my theory about cloud-side caching being a good target for a future 3G Kindle Fire, I tethered the tablet to my iPhone 4S and used AT&T's 3G network for all of the page loads.

I picked three sites this time around: AT, CNN and Engadget. I chose these three because CNN benefitted the most from Amazon's compression and AnandTech was penalized the most by going through Amazon's servers. Engadget was simply a good middle data point between the two.

Kindle Fire - Accelerated Page Loading Test (AT&T 3G)

Unfortunately even on AT&T's 3G network, Amazon's accelerated page loading made things slower. The impact wasn't as noticeable as it was over WiFi, but it's there. If you're a Kindle Fire owner and you want the fastest browsing experience, you'll want to disable Silk's accelerated page loading.

We are at the very beginning of this journey however, Amazon's eventual plans for Silk are far more aggressive than the 10% bandwidth savings we get today:

Depending on the content (and device) Silk could choose just how much of the workload to shift to the cloud. The selection can be dynamic and has some far reaching implications for dumber-than-a-tablet devices. Amazon made it very clear that to deliver an adequate experience on the Kindle Fire it could not sacrifice compute performance. With more server-side offloading technologies like Silk, Amazon could deliver competitive browsing experiences with less client-side compute. Opting for a slower SoC wouldn't just reduce cost but it'd also reduce power consumption, enabling thinner/lighter tablets. Earlier I mentioned how my original Kindle felt like it had the perfect form factor, but the Kindle Fire wasn't able to recreate that magic due to the hardware requirements of the platform - in the long term Silk may be Amazon's ticket to building more capable Kindle-like tablets without making form factor sacrifices.

I'm required to use the future tense here because today it's nothing more than speculation. The bigger problem is today Silk's accelerated page loading does more for Amazon than it does for you. It slows page load times and hands over a ton of behavior data to Amazon:

Amazon insists it doesn't log any user identifiable data and it purges logs at least every 30 days, both of which seem reasonable. Unfortunately neither does anything for the end user today. You're paying Amazon for a Kindle Fire, paying for the content to go on the device, and doing Amazon a huge favor by giving it insight into your browsing habits. This is similar to how the contract with Google works except in Google's case, you're trading behavioral data for a bunch of really good, free user experiences. Amazon needs to deliver something of value in order to make Silk's accelerated page loading an option that its users should use.

For now Amazon quietly leaves accelerated page loading an option enabled by default. I suspect if it hadn't made this decision, no one would use the feature as it actually slows down performance. If Amazon wants to do no evil in this case, it should either make accelerated page loading a compelling feature, or give Kindle users something in return for leaving it enabled (free Amazon Prime perhaps? :)).

Flash Performance & HTML5 Compatibility

As always I looked at Flash/HTML5 performance and HTML5 compatibility with Amazon's Silk browser. Neither is particularly impressive:

Flash/HTML5 Performance - GUIMark 3
  Bitmap (HTML5 Cache) Bitmap (Flash) Vector Test (HTML5) Vector Test (Flash) Compute (HTML5) Compute (Flash)
Amazon Kindle Fire (1024 x 600) 17.6 fps 29.9 fps 7.5 fps 22.6 fps 8.8 fps 28.4 fps
Apple iPad 2 (1024 x 768) 19.1 fps N/A 14.2 fps N/A 13.4 fps N/A
BlackBerry PlayBook (1024 x 600) 11.2 fps 26.3 fps 10.7 fps 25.9 fps 10.2 fps 23.0 fps
HP TouchPad (1024 x 768) 27.7 fps 42.6 fps 9.3 fps 28.5 fps 8.0 fps 22.1 fps
HTC Flyer (1024 x 600) 30.3 fps 50.6 fps 12.1 fps 21.4 fps 8.5 fps 26.6 fps
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (1280 x 800) 22.9 fps 25.0 fps 11.4 fps 19.3 fps 11.2 fps 23.6 fps

Flash/HTML5 performance are at least relatively competitive with other Android tablets, although definitely not the fastest solution here (especially given its lower resolution). I suspect this has more to do with the current implementation of Flash on the Kindle Fire rather than a hardware limitation.

A quick run through HTML5 test shows just how far Amazon has to go with its Silk browser:

 

The HTML5 Test
Test Amazon Kindle Fire Apple iPad 2 (iOS 5.0.1) HP TouchPad RIM PlayBook Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
Total Score 196 (and 1 bonus point) 296 (and 9 bonus points) 229 (and 5 bonus points) 274 (and 9 bonus points) 222 (and 3 bonus points)
Parsing rules 1/11 11 (2 bonus points) 6/11 11 (2 bonus points) 11 (2 bonus points)
Canvas 20 20 20 20 20
Video 21/31 21/31 (4 bonus points) 21/31 (4 bonus points) 21/31 (4 bonus points) 21/31
Audio 20 (1 bonus point) 20 (3 bonus points) 20 (1 bonus point) 20 (3 bonus points) 20 (1 bonus point)
Elements 13/28 22/28 16/28 20/28 20/28
Forms 32/98 75/98 41/98 47/98 52/98
User Interaction 34/36 17/36 34/36

34/36

7/36
History and navigation 5 5 0/5 5 0/5
Microdata 0/15 0/15 0/15 0/15 0/15
Web applications 19/20 15/20 15/20 15/20 15/20
Security 5/10 5/10 5/10 5/10 5/10
Geolocation 0 15 15 15 15
WebGL 0/25 9/25 0/25 0/25 0/25
Communication 5/25 25 15/25 25 5/25
Files 0/20 0/20 0/20 0/20 10/20
Storage 15/20 15/20 15/20 15/20 15/20
Workers 0/15 15 0/15 15 0/15
Local multimedia 0/20 0/20 0/20 0/20 0/20
Notifications 0/10 0/10 0/10 0/10 0/10
Other 6 6 6 6 6

The Acid3 score is a lot better at 95/100:

 

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  • StormyParis - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link

    The original Nook Color, at $200, was an heck of a deal. The current proprietary tablets (Nook Color 2 and Kindle Fire) are a lot less compelling due to the arrival of non-proprietary tablets at the same price point. Those are.. non-proprietary, and offer arguably better features.

    I'm still happy ith my original Nook Color. WHen it gets replaced, if it does, it probably will be by a true, un-walled-gardened, tablet.
  • Wierdo - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link

    Ars had a good review of the Nook tablet here:
    http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/reviews/2011/11/lea...

    "I have less doubt about the Nook Tablet as a capable product than I did about the Kindle Fire. The experience is not frustrating or jagged and doesn't feel as unfinished... However, I do have some doubts about the value of the Nook ecosystem. Amazon's selection in all categories seems a bit more diverse..."
  • rruscio - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link

    I wanted an entry level tablet that was an eReader. Check. But ...

    1) I really miss having Skype on here. Really.

    2) The lack of Google native apps results in my using the browser for gmail, Reader, et al. And then Google gives me links to all the other apps. Not the most comprehensible experience.

    3) The single/double/drag tap issues are more annoying than they need to be.

    4) wiFi isn't immediately available when the device wakes up. It takes some number of seconds to make the connection. The "wiFi not available" error is easily resolved by me tapping again. Why isn't is resolved by the app / OS waiting instead?

    5) The entire software experience seems less than fully baked. Yeah, I get the Christmas rush thing, but I don't have experience with Amazon updating software. Hope isn't change.

    6) The device feels familiar because I'm used to my Droid Inc. The speed is better, and the screen size is acreage versus postage stamp.

    If there's ever a phone that just 1) phone calls 2) text messaging 3) wiFi hot spot 4) non-larcenous plan, I'd predict that, and a tablet in this form factor, will kill the smart phone business.

    Great review.
  • genomecop - Thursday, December 1, 2011 - link

    1. I dont miss it at all.
    2. Not true. It comes preloaded with an email app that has gmail setup.
    3. Dont know what your talking about never have this issue
    4. Dont have this issue and I use mine all day long.
    5. Have no problem with the software at all. Everything works very smoothly.
    Just want to add...I've had an Ipad since launch and I have since stopped carrying it around. This fits in my coat pocket for use at the gym while doing cardio. At work, on my desk for quick web browsing. RSS feed for all Tech related news. Gmail. Reading on the subway. Uses my phones hotspot in the cab for use. Quick download of movies. I think its a great device.
  • mcturkey - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link

    In your conclusion, you state that $199 should be the entry level price point now. I'm anxiously awaiting your review of the Nook Tablet to see if that extra $50 is worth it (excluding my personal bias towards B&N for their willingness to fight back against Microsoft's ridiculous patent war against Android).
  • tipoo - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link

    Agreed, the new Nook looks interesting. I remember reading it has a larger battery than the Fire. Locking all but 1GB of its memory to B&N content sucks, but I'm sure someone will take that limitation off.
  • Lucian Armasu - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link

    Hardware wise, the extra 8GB of internal storage, extra 512 MB of RAM, and microSD slot, I think it;s worth it. Still I think the extra $50 would be worth it a lot more with the full Android experience. If the other Android manufacturers could put android 4.0 on an equivalent tablet to Kindle Fire, and price it at $250, I'd pick that one any day. You can still get all Amazon's services on the full Android, too, so no point limiting yourself for $50.
  • nace186 - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link

    I don't understand why you are comparing the Fire with all the tablet out there that's in a different class. What it should really be compare to is the Nook Color, and the Nook Tablet. Which either of them were included.
  • Wierdo - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link

    Yeah I read a review on Ars about it and they think the Nook tablet is a more capable product but Amazon has the edge in the ecosystem department, link posted on this thread somewhere if interested.
  • VivekGowri - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 - link

    We'll have a Nook Tablet review that touches on the comparisons to the Kindle Fire relatively soon :)

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