Kindle Fire Software Update Doesn't Fix Laggy Browser

As reported progressing Tuesday, Amazon has expelled a program refurbish for its Kindle Fire tablet, earnest extended "fluidity and performance" and softened "touch navigation responsiveness." But nowhere in its refurbish denunciation does Amazon verbalise to improvements in the speed of its Silk browser.

As it turns out, the new program refurbish doesn't appear to upgrade browser opening to a poignant degree. And that's a shame, since laggy web-page bucket times are a actual complaint for Amazon's tablet.

When we reviewed the Fire a small reduction than 5 weeks ago, we found the tablet's browser opening to be bizarrely, inexplicably slow. The Fire, after all, has a 1GHz dual-core processor, only similar to the iPad 2 and all the Android/Honeycomb competitors. So on estimate power alone, the Fire should have all the hardware it needs to broach swift web browsing.

What's more, the Fire is moreover upheld by Amazon's much-ballyhooed Silk technology, that splits estimate and data-fetching workloads between the inscription itself and the cloud. As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos settled in a Sept. 28 press let go before the Fire's launch, "We refactored and made up the browser program smoke-stack and right away pull pieces of the mathematics in to the [Amazon Web Services] cloud. When you use Silk - without considering about it or carrying out anything pithy - you're mission on the tender computational horsepower of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to speed up your web browsing."

On paper, Silk web browsing sounds marvelous. But when we tested the Kindle Fire in November, we found page bucket times to be twice and infrequently three times that of an iPad 2.

So, now, a few 5 weeks after that and

As Amazon describes it, "Traditional browsers contingency wait for to take the HTML record to be able to start downloading the other page assets. Silk is not similar since it learns these page characteristics automatically by aggregating the results of millions of page loads and maintaining this expertise on EC2 [Elastic Compute Cloud]."

I'm remorseful to inform that even after updating my inscription to the 6.2.1 OS build, Fire page loads still loiter significantly at the back the really same loads on iPad 2.

Yes, it appears the Fire's browsing opening has improved, and during contrast we didn't see 300 percent opening gaps between the Fire and iPad 2. But the figures I've composed still show the Fire isn't delivering on Amazon's silky promises.

Below are a few definite page bucket comparisons. Before contrast anything, we free any tablet's browser cache and history. For any test, we installed a site's URL in to the browser's residence bar, and used a stopwatch to portion the time between attack "go" on the onscreen keyboard, and when the really final intent installed in the page. Also, is to Kindle Fire, we left on the network default "Accelerate Page loading." This toggle allows the Silk browser to daub in to Amazon's back-end clouded cover servers. Load times are deliberate in seconds; descend scores are better.

Wired.com - Fire: 7.1; iPad 2: 5.2
NFL.com - Fire: 13.6; iPad 2: 11.0
NBA.com - Fire: 13.6; iPad 2: 5.3
Microsoft.com - Fire: 5.4; iPad 2: 2.6
TheVerge.com - Fire: 13.4; iPad 2: 11.1
BoingBoing.net - Fire: 20.0; iPad 2: 13.8
Imdb.com - Fire: 9.8; iPad 2: 5.3
BBC.co.uk - Fire: 8.0; iPad 2: 6.6
Yahoo.com - Fire: 5.8; iPad 2: 2.7
Amazon.com - Fire: 8.5; iPad 2: 4.6

I'll be the initial to concur my contrast lacks a number of critical controls. While we tested both tablets only two feet away from a Wi-Fi router, we didn't assessment any page bucket simultaneously, but rsther than sequentially - and varying server loads on the content-provider finish can affect browser bucket times. And, of course, we used a elementary stopwatch, not sensitive contrast equipment, to portion page bucket times.

Nonetheless, my contrast backs up my own anecdotal user experience: Web browsing on the Kindle Fire is still palpably slower than on the iPad 2. I'm no longer saying page loads that take three times longer, but the opening delta still ranges from "noticeable" to a few 200 percent.

Fire apologists will try to "explain away" the bad opening by reminding critics that the inscription is still only $200, a undoubted spur of the moment buy. And even we will concur that the Fire offers a good set of features for its low access price. Nonetheless, Amazon has well-known Silk as new thing technology that supercharges browser performance, and nothing about the Kindle Fire experience delivers on that promise.