Whatever the hiccups the dedicated cloud-supported Web browser for Amazon’s Kindle Fire had been experienced in the past is irrelevant now. Hacker TyHi from XDA-Developers has built a Silk package that can be ported to CyanogenMod 7 ROM for the same Kindle Fire, then to many other rooted devices running CyanogenMod 7, or devices running some MIUI custom ROMs. “Many” here means not all devices, but the spread of Silk widens, so to speak, by the supporting efforts of hacker named puneet_champ who corrected permissions and repackaged the Silk app. Procedure to get you Silk on your non-Amazon rooted device is pretty simple:

1. Download the pack here or here.
2. Use Root Explorer to copy the lib files to /system/lib set permissions the same as the others.
3. Install all of the .apks like you would side load.
4. Copy the com.amazon.cloud9-1.apk from /data/app to /system/app
5. Reboot and enjoy

However, there are still plenty of reports on force closures, or mess-ups with Amazon accounts and syncing.  So if your device is not mentioned as a successful port in this database, you might wait a little bit longer. Owners of Nexuses and other devices running ICS may also want to wait a tidbit longer: adjusting Silk into a compliance with the Ice Cream Sandwich Android framework continues.

When success stories are reported, results are dubious still. First, just a simple porting of the Silk browser to other than Kindle Fire devices are nowhere in the position to cure inherent problems with the overall Amazon cloud support for Web browsing. Moreover, an influx of many devices running Silk without Amazon’s permission might worsen the workload for that cloud even more. Second, many devices where Silk was ported to were just Android phones with their smallish screens. Navigating controls of Silk just don’t scale down gracefully for these, as Silk is technically a browser for tablets with their bigger screens.

Me, I didn’t put Silk on my Nook Color just yet.

The post Amazon Kindle Fire Silk Browser Ported to Other Android Devices appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

Some of you might remember how much hoopla Amazon played at their Kindle Fire presentation about how fast their wonderful, magic Silk browser is. Well, the circus left town for now, and folks who believed Amazon ended up getting something else instead of swift Silk. There’s a solid Silk browser test review published at Anandtech. In short, theoretical gains in speed for the Silk browser working with Amazon cloud servers can be severely diminished or even reverted by real life limitations of the Fire’s CPU, of  limits on number TCP/IP stack connections and corresponding bandwidth, and by RAM available for Silk operations on Fire. General advice is to not use the main Silk feature, namely “Accelerate Page Loading”, as it seems useless for the Fire at best, and even opposite results in most cases; slower Web page loading compared to “unaccelerated” mode.

The staff geek of Howtogeek website has compiled a simple set of simple measures that can make your Fire’s Silk feel silkier and speedier:

Open up the browser, hit the menu button at the bottom of the screen, hit the Settings button, and then find the following options:

• Enable plug-ins: off
• Accelerate page loading: Unchecked
• Desktop or mobile view: Mobile

You don’t have to change the browser into Mobile view, though we do recommend it. Just disabling Flash and the “accelerate page loading” made a big difference while browsing. You can also change the plug-ins to allow them on demand, but that usually ends up with a lot of annoying prompts, so it’s not usually worth it—it’s worth noting that YouTube still works just fine without the Flash plugin enabled.

What you see here as a result, is the Silk browser stripped of all its silk, so to speak. When in such a state, I bet it’s no different than the stock Android Webkit-based Gingerbread browser.

One thing is trying to improve the performance of the Silk browser, but its just mind blowing how attempting to “improve” it would cause a Fire user such grief that they would easily choose an alternative browser, like side-loaded Opera Mobile with its hardware accelerated Web page rendering.   More radical ways of accelerating Web browsing experiences for the Amazon Kindle Fire could be offered by flashing an Ice Cream Sandwich based custom ROMs on Fire, thus rooting it. That is, when these ROMs would be available for public consumption.

The post How To Increase Kindle Fire Silk Speed appeared first on Mobile Magazine.