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It seems like the new "experimental" web browser in the Kindle is fairly limited in capabilities. Styling of even the included bookmarks looks a bit rough. In one video, the person mentions JavaScript being enabled in "advanced" mode but there was no demonstration of what that means. As of writing this, the product page only offers a quick paragraph about international support limitations.
What sort of web standards does the Kindle WebKit browser officially support?
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Among all its features, Kindle comes with a web browser.
Your Kindle comes with an experimental application called Basic Web, a web browser optimized to read text-based websites. It supports JavaScript, SSL, and cookies but does not support media plug-ins (Flash, Shockwave, etc.) or Java applets.
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.
Kindle's browser uses the WebKit layout engine. It supports javascript.
The display on the Kindle Paperwhite models uses a technology called e-ink to provide an appearance similar to a printed page. The e-ink display offers low power consumption and high contrast for good readability under a wide range of lighting conditions.
Going back to Kindle firmware 3.2.x, the experimental browser absolutely supports JavaScript (ES3 spec), some CSS 2.x, and scores 55 (our of 555 possible points) on HTML5Test.com. It more or less passes the Acid3 browser test at 100%. This puts it on significantly better footing than Internet Explorer 8, other than on raw JavaScript performance benchmarks.
Strictly speaking, it is not an HTML5-capable browser despite having a non-zero score on HTML5Test.com. It doesn't support any HTML5 document features, but at the same time supports relatively advanced features like Web Workers, Cross-Document messaging, and Cross-Origin Resource Sharing.
With our Kindle 2 with International 3G, we were able to check Yahoo email, Gmail, Wikipedia, and some Maps from a remote site in Taiwan while on vacation. You can jailbreak a Kindle 2 to install the Kindle 3.x firmware. Any Kindle after the Kindle 2 can be updated to the latest 3.x firmware and have a quite functional, albeit archaic, browser compared to competing e-ink devices.
Even the very latest Kindle e-ink devices (firmware 5.8.x) only score 152 (out of 555) on HTML5Test.com, on par with Internet Explorer 9 which was 2 years behind competing browsers when it was released 6 years ago. They support some aspects of the ES5.1 JavaScript standard, but several aspects are missing/broken. It has partial support for WebSockets that makes it unusable for most web apps that use that feature, but no support for Server Sent Events which is bizarre for a device where battery life is critical. Amazon continues their history of what appears to be a purposefully broken CSS2.1 and CSS3 implementation, and the browser will hang or crash when trying popular benchmark sites like JetStream, ARES- 6, or Ringmark. One cool saving grace is the inclusion of Local Storage and Canvas support, which would make it possible to have games with decent functionality if their animations are optimized for e-ink refresh rates. The Kindle browser doesn't support web standard touch events in the browser, but there's other control possibilities a developer could employ.
That being said, even Kindle firmware 5.8.x is a decent browser on a device that has weeks-long battery life. It will reasonably render the low-end mobile (read: iOS and Android 2.x) versions of Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and other major sites with only minor render issues. Amazon can and should provide a better web experience given the prices they charge, but in the worst case scenario the jailbreak community compensates wonderfully on the software side.
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