Tips & Tricks: Speed Up The Fire’s Silk Browser

A common complaint among Fire owners is that the Silk browser is a bit sluggish. If you’re part of this group, you’ll want to try these tips for streamlining Silk so it’ll load pages more quickly and display them in a mode that’s optimized for the Fire’s Screen. From How-To Geek:

Not that long ago, we reviewed the Kindle Fire, and one of our biggest complaints was how lousy the browser is—but we’ve discovered the trick to making it actually fast. Here’s how to fix it.

What’s the problem?

The browser, in the default settings, is essentially attempting to be a desktop browser on a little 7” screen that doesn’t exactly use your screen space very well. As part of this silliness, the browser is set to “Desktop” mode, and Flash is enabled by default. Because of this, the browser stutters, dies, chokes, skips, and is generally a pain to deal with. Oh yeah, and there’s that “Silk” optimization that hasn’t lived up to the hype.

That’s all a thing of the past.

How to Make the Kindle Browser Actually Fast

Here’s what we’re going to do, and as usual, it’s a matter of disabling Flash. While we’re at it, we’re going to disable the page “accelerate” feature, and change the browser to mobile mode.

While How-To Geek also recommends disabling flash (a type of web animation) and a number of other things, note that you can experiment a little with your settings to get the best compromise between functionality and speed for you. Some Fire owners won’t miss flash at all, others rely on it for playing online games and watching online animations on the Fire, so it’s worth spending the time to do a little custom fine-tuning on your Fire settings, rather than just going down the How-To Geek list and making every change listed there. And remember, if you change your mind about a given setting change you’ve made, you can always just change it back to the original, factory setting.

Read the rest of the article on How-To Geek.