Along with three new e-ink readers (Kindle Classic, Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G) and a new, 7-inch, Android-based Kindle Fire, Amazon has also announced the introduction of a web browser — Amazon Silk — that uses the power of Amazon’s Elastic Compute cloud to produce a desktop-like browsing experience on its Kindle Fire tablet. Silk is WebKit-based, uses Google’s SDPY HTTP-replacement protocol, supports Flash 10 — and no, despite what it sounds like, Silk is not comparable to Opera Mini.

Despite their beautiful screens, bucket loads of RAM, and tons of solid-state storage, tablets and smartphones have one undeniable shortcoming when compared to their laptop and desktop cousins: processing power. The CPU and GPU are by far the most power-hungry components of a modern computer, and as a result it is the one-or-two-watt ARM SoCs that dominate the mobile computing market.

Now, the vast gulf of compute power between x86 and ARM can be mostly ameliorated by native apps — a solid iOS app can be as “smooth” as a PC app — but when it comes to interpreted content, such as websites and web apps, the difference is plain to see. The fact is, mobile chips just can’t handle JavaScript or render HTML5 and CSS3 as quickly as their desktop counterparts. Furthermore, a single web page (or app) can contain hundreds of resources — images, external script and CSS files, Flash — and high-latency 3G or spotty WiFi connections just aren’t up to the task of fetching each of those files within a suitable timeframe.

Cloud-powered tablets

With Amazon Silk, Amazon’s cloud compute cluster (EC2 and S3) performs most of the network activity and rendering — Amazon sucks down the target website, lays it out, renders it — and then ships it off as a much smaller, condensed package to the Kindle Fire tablet. The exact details aren’t known, but instead of having to download 50 resources from a variety of web servers, the Amazon Silk browser will probably download just one compressed packages from the Amazon cloud, and then uncompress it and display it to the user. As a result, page loads will be faster and websites will be more responsive. Amazon says that for each page load, the individual tasks that make up a web page — networking, layout, script execution, rendering — will be dynamically assigned to either EC2 or the local Kindle Fire browser; how this works in practice, we’re not sure, but it sounds like a very novel way to bring the power of the cloud to the tablet.

If you’ve used Opera Mini — an existing browser that you can use on almost every phone platform — Amazon Silk certainly sounds similar, but it’s important to note that Silk does not send out images of the content; all of the assets arrive on your Kindle Fire tablet, so you get a full browsing experience. With regards to video content, we are told that Amazon Silk doesn’t transcode content — but presumably the dual-core processor in the Kindle Fire and Flash support is enough to handle most YouTube videos.

Security… and more speed!

By leveraging EC2 and S3, Amazon can also do a few other clever things with Silk. For a start, Amazon can cache static files in the cloud — images, CSS, JavaScript — further speeding up page load times on the Kindle Fire. Amazon says that EC2 keep permanent connections open to popular sites like Facebook and Google, too, reducing latency by a few more milliseconds — and if that wasn’t enough, Amazon EC2 will also use predictive algorithms to pre-download the link that it thinks you will click next. Finally, the use of SPDY instead of HTTP between Kindle Fire and EC2 should result in Silk being much, much faster than comparable Android or iOS browsers.

With regards to privacy, because all of your web requests will go through the cloud, your surfing will effectively be fully anonymous — target websites will see Amazon’s IP addresses, not yours. If you’re worried about Amazon sniffing your data, though, you can turn off “EC2 acceleration” in the browser’s settings.

All in all, then, Amazon Silk will be faster than the competition, it will save everyone (except Amazon) bandwidth costs, and it will even provide a little more security. One important fact is unknown, though: what version of WebKit is Amazon Silk using? Is it closer to desktop versions of Chrome and Safari, or is it like Android 2.3’s stock browser? Has Amazon designed the Kindle Fire to be a first-rate device for HTML5 web apps, or merely a content-consumption machine? We probably won’t find out until we receive a review unit for some real hands-on testing and benchmarks — which will hopefully be in the next few weeks.

Read more about Amazon Silk, check Amazon’s Silk FAQ, or watch the intro video below

With additional reporting by Sal Cangeloso