2

I have a client who wants me to optimize their mobile website for the Kindle Fire. I've done development on iPhone, iPad, and Android, but not for Android tablets and not specifically for the Kindle Fire either.

I wanted to know, as a mobile web developer, are there any special considerations I should make or any red flags I should be aware of for doing web development on this platform?

After doing some research, it looks like it's using Android 2.3, running an Opera mini-like browser called Amazon Silk, and using a networking protocol called SPDY. A found an article that suggests I should be designing for a 1280 × 752 space.

I found one article on Quora that says "Silk tracks user behaviors in aggregate, and will attempt to predict likely next pages (similar to what some browsers do to preload links - just in a more targeted manner). It then delivers that content to the device ahead of time." That raised a little bit of a red flag for me because I do implement some server side (php) tracking and logging on some of my webpages. I don't want to be recording logs on pages that aren't being requested by a real person.

Other than that, I don't really see anything else to be concerned about. Thoughts?

TJ Kirchner
  • 4,321
  • 6
  • 24
  • 26
  • I thought the only special about that web browser that it channeled al l the trafic through the amazone servers. They are doing some caching or something like that. I am not really sure if you need to something really different for this silk browser – mariomario May 09 '12 at 14:13
  • Yea, that's what I heard too. It looks like it tries to obtain all of a webpage's resources in one http request and then caches that result for some time for the next time someone asks for it. That may or may be a problem, depending on how the cache works. – TJ Kirchner May 09 '12 at 14:18
  • maybe this link is of any help http://www.labnol.org/software/kindle-user-agent-string/20378/ – mariomario May 09 '12 at 14:40
  • That's actually quite interesting. I find the silk mode ua string quite interesting too... and a little frustrating. The word "Kindle" isn't in there at all. I guess I'll have to search for "Kindle Fire"and silk to recognize the device. Thanks for sharing! – TJ Kirchner May 10 '12 at 14:27
  • A heads up. Silk Browser nowadays also lives in FireTV. – Jonny Oct 30 '19 at 11:38

1 Answers1

8

The Amazon Silk backend does employ certain optimizations to reduce latency. But, as a general rule, you don't need to factor the Silk backend into your web development considerations. There are no gotchas to worry about.

With regard to the UA string: You can find the latest and greatest info on the Silk user agent at the Silk Developer Guide: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/silk/latest/developerguide/user-agent.html.

Dave Huntsperger
  • 214
  • 3
  • 6