Amazon said today that it has added web-browsing capabilities to Fire TV and Fire TV Stick devices through Mozilla’s Firefox and its own browser, Silk.
Amazon said web-browsing is available starting today on all Fire TV devices in more than 100 countries, though The Verge spotted Silk browsing capabilities last month. Amazon said it optimized Silk, the browser built for Kindle devices, to function well on big-screen TVs.
“With full web browsers on Fire TV, our customers’ entertainment and information options are greatly expanded. We want to make it easy for customers to access the Web from the comfort of their couch,” said Marc Whitten, vice president of Amazon Fire TV and Appstore.
Amazon says its Fire TV devices are the top selling streaming media players in the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan, with “tens of millions of monthly active users.” The market for streaming devices is a competitive one, with Amazon battling Google’s Chromecast, Apple TV and Roku, among many others.
This competition has caused some tension among tech giants. Just this week Chromecast and Apple TV devices popped on Amazon, more than two years after the retail giant pulled them from the online store because they weren’t compatible with the Prime Video streaming service. This detente comes after Prime Video finally debuted on Apple TV earlier this month. Google pulled YouTube from the Fire TV and Echo Show device last month, but it’s possible that Amazon’s decision to sell Chromecasts again could defuse that dispute.
