Why choose Mowser for mobile transcoding over Google?

Filed under: Design, Internet, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Web services, Google, Mobile Minute, iPhone

Why choose Mowser for mobile transcoding over Google?

by Naser Hossain Dec 24th 2007

If you've ever used a mobile phone or PDA to surf the web, you've probably noticed that some sites render better than others on a small screen. That's because some web developers design special mobile versions of their pages. But there are also several web-based services that "mobilize" web sites by stripping some data and presenting you with a stripped down version of a web page.

Probably the most popular web-site mobilizing services are Google Mobile and Skweezer. Mowser is a less popular service, but it might be the best of the bunch. We first checked out Mowser earlier this year, but a recent article from Mowser creator Russel Beattie made us take another look.

Beattie says Google has a nasty habit of seeking out site competence by looking for a mobile version that has been prepared by the web-site owner. If its unable to find any such versions, Google transcodes its own version of the webpage, stripping down important details in the process ( visible in the screenshot). Definitely a nightmare for webmasters everywhere.

According to Beattie, Mowser will keep most of your site's important stuff (like AdSense ads) intact and even let you customize the look and feel of your mobilized pages with a custom "handheld" (not literally though) stylesheet. Neat huh? Alll you have to do is to tell Google to use Mowser (or your dedicated mobile site) instead of their..umm.. tasteless transcoder. The code (barely a few lines of HTML that goes into the HTML header section) needed to do just that are available in Russels's post. Now most of this might seem like a lot of hassle to general website owners, but for dedicated webmasters, proper rendering on handhelds might mean a rising popularity among a large majority of internet users. Why leave yourself out? Go Mowserise your site today.

[Via: UNEASYSilence]

Tags: google, handhelds, mobile, mobilize, mowser, rendering, webmaster

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

moco said 5:30PM on 12-24-2007

woow! http://www.holydays.mactanque.com

whisky said 5:50AM on 12-25-2007

Yap... Mowser is really cute, especially for sites like engadget or downloadsquad!! but Mowser seems not able to manage correctly other charset than latin1?

and in this case, skweezer is a better choice

Mike Rowehl said 5:08PM on 12-28-2007

Actually, we try to be characterset agnostic. As long as the originating server reports the characterset properly we should be passing it along. Any site in particular that you're having a problem with?

rose said 12:33PM on 12-31-2007

www.bywifi.com is another good mobile proxy. It provides auto zoom feature, which is my favor.

Originally Posted by www.bywifi.com:
About This Site:
1. Provide searching, saving and realtime transcoding 3GP video services for mobile phones.
2. Optimizes Web pages for mobile phones, providing a richer browsing experience.

Rahul Ghai said 11:25AM on 1-01-2008

On the other hand i highly recommend opera mini 4. It provides beautiful transcoding, allows zooming in and out, etc, etc. Even the igoogle page is rendered perfectly : )

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