Amazon Kindle Fire: Smooth as Silk

We wrote extensively about the Amazon Kindle Fire from the business perspective. Instead of being a direct competitor to the iPad, the Fire amounts to a scaled-up Kindle. The Fire will do more than the classic Kindle, but less than iPad. One of the more interesting innovations in the Kindle Fire is its new “Silk” browser. The browser has been called by some half browser and half app.

The Silk browser is designed to store parts of web pages in the cloud, making for a faster and more effective browsing for Fire users. In some case, instead of loading an entire web page, it will load the part that the user really needs. This will be something like the browser designing a tablet-optimized version of the web page on its own. Amazon is using its Elastic Cloud Computer (EC2) service.

The first reaction is that this is a very cool feature and a convenience to allow users to access information faster. But is it just a nice convenience, or another potential encroachment on privacy?