Agree -- and I totally meant to mention that as well. In fact, Opera Mini is a more on-point example than the Blackberry infrastructure, as with Opera Mini (at least some builds thereof) you similarly had no choice in keeping another server out of your web-browsing experience.

It's worth taking note that this is not a completely novel idea. The Blackberry web browser when running the Blackberry Internet Service has also used server-side resources of RIM's infrastructure to slice and dice and optimize web services. The same is true of email attachments -- the RIM infrastructure intercepts and re-optimizes. Especially apparent in viewing PDF attachments to email. In the Blackberry Enterprise Server infrastructure, this functionality actually moves to ones own BES server instance, with end-to-end encryption between the BES server and the handheld. This fact, at least, provides a corporation with the ability to not have the security exposure of having RIM decipher the pages and content. Perhaps the objection is that for Kindle fire we don't have an independently implementable server-side browsing optimization node?

I love that word pernicious... I've started naming all my servers after nasty p-words. pernicious, persnickety, pugnacious...