8. Web

The Fire is a great device for web browsing. I find myself using it more and more for casual Internet surfing as I watch TV. Fire’s browser, Silk, offers up all the features we have come to expect from a modern browser: tabs, bookmarks, and integrated Google search. The most interesting feature of Silk isn’t on your Fire at all; it is in the cloud.

Amazon calls it accelerated browsing. As mentioned in Chapter 1, when you open a website in Silk, you’re actually telling some of Amazon’s servers to fetch the page for it, do whatever processing is required, and deliver the page to your Fire. Offloading the crunching of scripts and other potentially processor-intensive tasks has two effects: It allows your Fire to use its processor power for other tasks, and it speeds up your web browsing.