While we knew that the 6.2.2 update to the Kindle Fire tablet was mainly going to be a matter of performance upgrades and behind the scenes stuff, a few things were noticed as the roll-out quietly began that were worth drawing attention to immediately. As noted, the upgrade to this newest firmware did break root access for user who went that route. This was addressed quite quickly, however, and initial doubts about whether or not BurritoRoot 2 would do the job seem to have been based on people failing to follow instructions correctly. Aside from that, all we could see was the admittedly convenient full screen option for the Silk browser.
Things have settled in a little bit better now and Amazon was kind enough to let us in on what the entirety of the patch was meant to accomplish. There are a couple perks:
Kindle Fire Silk Browser Customization
Users are now able to set their browser to disable Flash. This was possible previously, but through the setting for “Enable Plugins”, which some users found confusing and overly broad. By default, Flash will be disabled. Check Silk’s Settings menu under the Behavior heading to turn it back on.
It is also now possible to disable the constant encrypted data shuffle through Amazon’s servers. While you are still able to turn it on in settings by clicking on “Enable Optional Encryption”, users should find significantly improved performance now that it is non-mandatory. This will not have any effect on encrypted connections to web pages.
Also, to access the previously mentioned full screen browsing, simply click on the square of four outward facing arrows in the lower-right corner of the Silk browser’s menu bar, next to the bookmark button.
Performance Improvements
There has been some small but noticable improvement made to the speed and smoothness of rendering on the Kindle Fire. Scrolling, panning, and pinch to zoom all seem to work more fluidly and without the occasional stutter than previously occurred during fast movements. Hard to say how impressive this is for most things at the moment, but there’s never anything wrong with optimization. Read how to open NUMBERS file.
Email Control
It is now simpler, and in some cases possible where it was not before, to get email addresses set up manually. Doesn’t fix all gmail complaints, but for the most part that has to do with the gmail end of things being updated so often (for the record, my own gmail account works fine with IMAP enabled, but other experiences may vary).
Many users have been somewhat disappointed to note that this update did not include the addition of finer control over the carousel or Kindle library collection management. Presumably, however, a project this large has more than one feature being worked on at any given time and so we can probably assume that something is being done to address the vocal complaints of the user base even if it is not quite ready for release yet. Personally I found it beyond tedious to manually delete my entire Kindle library from the carousel when the feature was introduced and would love a Mass-Remove type of option as soon as possible.