Which Amazon web browser uses a split cloud-and-device architecture?

Amazon Silk is the Amazon web browser that uses a split cloud-and-device architecture.

Amazon introduced Silk in 2011 for the Kindle Fire. Its defining idea was to divide browser work dynamically between the device and Amazon’s cloud infrastructure. Depending on factors such as network conditions, page complexity and cached content, Silk can perform networking, HTML processing or page rendering locally or offload some of those tasks to Amazon EC2 servers.

The design aimed to make web browsing faster and more responsive on mobile hardware by combining the device’s interface with the computing capacity of Amazon Web Services. Silk is based on the open-source Chromium project and uses the Blink rendering engine and V8 JavaScript engine.

The name is easy to confuse with a generic “cloud browser,” but Amazon Silk is the specific product. It later became available on other Amazon hardware, including Fire TV and Echo Show devices. Its cloud routing also prompted privacy discussions because some browsing traffic could pass through Amazon’s servers; cloud acceleration was not guaranteed to help on fast connections or simple pages.