Mowser mobilizes any Web page

By Rafe Needleman – April 19, 2007 3:25 PM PDT

Mowser's simple interface, in Firefox

(Credit: CNET Networks)

If your phone has a rotten Web browser, bookmark Mowser, and use it as the front-end to the Web on your mobile. Mowser transcodes any page into a Web-friendly format, stripping out large graphics and splitting a Web page into smaller pages that a phone can handle. It's also RSS-aware: If there's an RSS feed on a page you visit, it will provide a link for it, and transcode the feed into a format your phone can easily display.

The service has built-in bookmarks for major sites that are already mobile friendly (which it does not transcode) and it has keywords for popular searches. For example, if you type "wi" followed by a search term, you'll get the Mowser-compacted version of the Wikipedia page for that term.

Mowser doing its job with CNN.com on a Windows smartphone.

My only issue with the Mowser transcoder is that, in my tests, it often displayed a site's left-hand navigation before or in the middle of content, requiring me to skip forward several pages just to see a top story.

But even so, it beats the stuffing out the built-in browser on most phones.

The site's creator, Russell Beattie, has recorded a video tour of the service.