Re: Amazon Silk

On 10/5/2011 9:47 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> I think it's more useful to think of Opera Mini or Silk as distributed
> (in the distributed computing sense) browsers than as a browser and a
> proxy,

Yes, exactly. Many of the trust and other issues that have come up in the 
context of Silk apply equally to a more traditional browser like Firefox: 
you trust it with your passwords, it knows all the pages you've accessed 
and could in principle pass that list on to someplace else, it could in 
principle rewrite your pages before displaying them, etc.

What I think does make Silk a bit different in practice has nothing to do 
with browser architecture or what we define as a browser, but rather with 
where Amazon in particular fits in the Internet Ecosystem. Amazon may have 
a motivation to do things with the Web content passing through it that 
organizations like Mozilla might not (e.g. to mine it for information that 
would be useful to its online stores and/or advertising operations.)

Noah

Received on Wednesday, 5 October 2011 13:55:29 UTC