The Amazon’s Kindle Fire Tablet comes loaded with the Silk browser which is interesting and exciting for a number of reasons. The first is that the browser is designed with a “split” architecture, allowing it to offload much of the heavy lifting to Amazon’s cloud computing cluster for superior browsing performance. Well, that’s theory the reality seems to be much different.
Our good friend Avarm over at Laptop Mag has uncovered that the Silk browser is a lot faster with its cloud acceleration feature disabled. They found that four popular websites loading significantly faster with Silk’s acceleration feature turned off. Businessweek.com, for example, took 16.5 seconds to load with acceleration on, but only 8 seconds with it off.
After waiting a few weeks for the system to settle down and fix any potential glitches Avarm put 7 popular sites to the test on Amazon’s Silk Browser, Opera Mobile on the Fire and the default Android browser on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 plus.
As you can see from the above table on average, the Silk browser is 25 percent faster with acceleration turned off. Opera Mobile is a little slower on average than Silk with acceleration disabled, but Opera has a turbo function that is pretty much the same as Silk’s accelerator. It would be interesting to see whose cloud accelerator functioned better on Fire, regardless of that result its still shocking that one of the Fire’s ‘advantages’ is hindering the tablets performance so significantly.
Lucky for us it only takes a few seconds to turn the acceleration off, so you’ll be browsing happily in no time. If you’re curious about the methodology or want a much more in depth analysis I’d encourage you to check out the full test results over at Laptop Mag.
