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Fall 2016 Amazon Silk Web Browser Update Adds Recommendations, Bookmark Folder

Amazon isn’t investing as much effort in publicizing their web browser as they used to (they’ve even deleted the Amazon Silk blog) but work has continued since the update last fall.

Last night my Fire tablet refreshed its web browser with the popup shown in the following screenshot.

The Silk browser team has updated the app with a bookmark folder, a "Most Visited Sites" option in the address bar, and an algorithmic "Instant Recommendations" feature.

As you can see in the screenshot at the end of the post, the most visited sites feature shows you the sites you frequent. I don’t use my silk browser for much, so mine is rather boring, but this feature does work.

The instant recommendations feature, on the other hand, does not. I tested the feature on several different pages, and none of the recommended articles were relevant to the pages I was viewing.

The recommended articles did have a vague connection in a keyword matching sort of way, but they did not have a topic similar or even related to the one I was reading at the time.

This is clearly a feature which needs to go back to the drawing board.

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Comments


Irv Fullerton May 28, 2017 um 8:56 am

Here in May of 2017 Amazon has finally broken the Instant Recommendations feature contained within their Silk Browser. They recently pushed through several application updates – one of which provided a new on/off switch for Instant Recommendations; however, in the process they completely disabled this feature from finding ANY matching articles. In addition, they also disabled the swipe from the right functionality. The developers in charge of Silk drive me crazy!!


Irv Fullerton May 29, 2017 um 10:26 am

UPDATE: Today, 5/29/17, Instant Recommendations is working perfectly. Swipe from the right still doesn’t work; however, that’s not a show-stopper for me.


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