Amazon releases Silk web browser for (most) Fire TV devices

As expected, Amazon, has released a web browser for its Fire TV platform, allowing you to surf the web on your TV. Perhaps more importantly, the new Silk Browser for Fire TV also lets you play web video, which can come in handy if you want to stream content from a site that doesn’t have a Fire TV or Android app.

The Silk Browser for Fire TV is available from the Amazon Appstore, and it currently supports most Fire TV devices… but not the first-gen Fire TV Stick or the new 3rd-gen Fire TV (although support for that device is coming soon).

You can search or enter a URL using the Fire TV’s on-screen keyboard, but typing out large amounts of text that way can be time consuming. Fortunately you can also use the microphone on any Fire TV with voice input to search, or you can use the Fire TV app on a phone or tablet to use your mobile device’s keyboard for faster typing.

Out of the box the default search engine is set to Bing, but there are options to change it to Google or Yahoo. You can also bookmark pages to get to them more quickly in the future.

The direction and select buttons on the Fire TV remote work like mouse buttons for clicking links and navigating websites. And if you go to a page with a video player you can start the video and/or maximize it using those mouse-like controls and then use the remote’s play/pause button to control video playback.

Overall, Silk seems to be a pretty useful addition to the Fire TV toolkit. There are certainly plenty of web apps I wouldn’t want to navigate with a remote control, but the addition of a web browser makes it easy to quickly look something up without switching to another device. It also allows you to show a website to someone else without having everyone crowd around a phone or laptop screen. And of course it also lets you play videos that might not otherwise be accessible on a Fire TV.

via AFTV News