Kindle Fire: Out of the Box

Chapter 6. Web and Email

With the launch of the Fire Amazon made a pretty big deal of Amazon Silk, the brand-new mobile web browser created especially for (and, for the time being at least, running exclusively on) the Fire. Like the other hallmarks of the device, Silk is “powered by the cloud,” which in this case means it leverages its own servers to add power to your browsing and cut back on the time you have to wait for pages to load.

Web

When you launch Amazon Silk for the first time, you’ll see a bunch of bookmarks that Amazon thought would be helpful to get you started browsing. But even if you don’t tap on any of them, there’s not a whole lot to learn to get you going. To access a web page, just tap in the URL bar at the top and type the address with the virtual keyboard that pops up, as described in Using the Keyboard. Figure 6-1 shows a page loaded in the browser.

Figure 6-1. The Silk web browser

Here’s the rest of the things you’ll most likely be interested in getting right into, now that you’re off and running.

History

After you’ve visited a page, Silk records it in your history for easy access later. Now, when you tap in the URL bar, your history is displayed beneath it, as shown in Figure 6-2. If you want to visit a recently accessed page, just tap it in the list.

Figure 6-2. Web ...