Will Amazon make the Silk cloud backend available to other browsers?
My answer to this question on Quora -
I for one would think that even if they do open Silk, browser vendors will be less inclined to use it.
Google (Chrome), for example has its own cloud infrastructure, potentially bigger than Amazon’s.
Safari (my current browser of choice) traditionally is very conservative on using any 3rd party services due to Apple’s focus on simplicity - not a bad thing at all in my opinion.
Firefox can benefit potentially but fundamentally it might not be a big win and here’s why.
Silk/computing in the cloud primarily aids mobile (including tablet) devices - with limited network & cpu/memory resources. That’s when this really shines! - the approach of offloading some of the processing and caching on the cloud.
For desktop browsers, some of the above constraints sort of, vanish - more cpu/memory/caching capacity available. And hence the benefits are smaller, much smaller. In fact, it might even negatively impact overall performance, if Amazon’s cloud is experiencing a lot of traffic for example.
I do believe however that the hybrid processing and caching model is a terrific idea when well executed for smaller devices. But there is just not enough motivation as of yet for more powerful devices.
