The Amazon Kindle has employed an Experimental Browser for over ten years. You can easily surf the internet on almost all models of Kindles, but due to advancements in e-paper, using a model made in the past 4 years will provide the best experience. If you decide to use the browser, there is something you have to do, in order to stop most webpages from endlessly loading, disable JavaScript.
Amazon first developed the experimental browser back in 2009, with the release of the Kindle, 2nd generation. The web was a very different place, most websites were text based, and ditto with message boards. Over the years, websites started to have multimedia elements and as internet speeds grew, designers adopted higher quality graphics and modern web design principals. Custom code, CSS, JavaScript and content management systems like WordPress become widely adopted. The Kindle Experimental Browser basically hasn’t changed in over a decade.
If you decide to use the Experimental Browser to read news websites, tech blogs or your favorite forum, it is important to disable JavaScript. It basically stops lots of code from plugins and scripts from loading and improves the browsing experience. When the browser is open, click on the 3 dots on the side and hit Browser Settings and Disable JavaScript. When this was done, browsing websites like Good e-Reader became much most robust, and scrolling downwards was very fast. Why is this the case?
Most websites have lots of code, especially ones that run content management systems. The more plugins a website has, the more JavaScript is called locally or externally. This can result in long load times on the Kindle browser, and scrolling down, refreshes the code, and it loads again. By disabling JavaScript, performance increased by 70% on all websites that were tested.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.