Web browsers on mobile phones and PDAs are notoriously bad at rendering web pages meant to be viewed on monitors with resolutions of 1024x768 or higher resolutions. Pages can take an incredibly long time to load, and once they do, you're often presented with the least important information first as the browser puts all the navigation links from the left side of the page first, followed by the content.

Mowser is one of the latest web-based solutions for these problems. There's no program to download, just one website to bookmark. You navigate to Mowers.com, and then type in the URL of the page you want to visit. Mowser splits the page up into a series of smaller pages that will load faster. It also strips out most of the graphics.

The site also has a list of popular sites that are already designed for the small screen.

Overall, the idea is great, but the execution is so-so. For example, if you use the link to the New York Times News River, everything looks great on a mobile browser. But if you type www.nytimes.com into Mowser, the first screen you see is a page of navigation links. It's not until halfway through the second page that you start to get articles.

The developer has a video walkthrough on the company blog if you want to get a full look at Mowser's features. For a list of similar resources, check out Download Squad's roundup of mobile start pages.

[via WebWare]