Amazon Silk browser: any special considerations for front-end developers

Question

Do front-end developers need any special considerations for the Amazon Silk Browser because of it's split architecture and it's re-sizing of images? Or can it be considered as just another webkit browser from a developer's perspective?

Answer 1

In general I've found Silk - especially the newer versions - to behave as a pretty standard WebKit browser. Some of the Apple specific tuning isn't there so testing against Chrome on the desktop has been the closest experience (though one caveat there is that Chrome does seem to take webkit fixes faster than anyone else)

I've not seen anything that would indicate that accelerated browsing does anything different for EC2 hosted content - As hosted content often comes from a number of sources I don't expect they'd split traffic on internal and external networks though it sounds like something worth asking in the forums at forums.developer.amazon.com/forums/category.jspa?categoryID=3 to get an official answer

Answer 2

In general, you can develop content for Amazon Silk as you would for any other browser. The EC2 backend follows all standard caching semantics, and the media handling is as you'd expect.

In general, it's a good idea to set the height and width attributes explicitly on images and other page elements, and to design responsively for the form factor. In other words, the standard web development best practices apply.