Mowser is a tool that helps you cram full web pages onto the tiny web browser on your cellphone. Just go to the Mowser web site, type in the URL you want to read, and Mowser will strip away all the unnecessary visual information that looks fine on a desktop web browser but bogs down your cellphone.

We first covered Mowser when it launched about a year ago, and we're sad to tell you that founder Russell Beattie says the product is "at the end of its life in its current form."


Beattie reports that his company has been having a difficult time raising funds and has been making very little money from advertising. Rather than regroup, Beattie is giving up because he says he doesn't believe in the "mobile web" anymore.

That's kind of sad, because the service was fairly useful if you've got an old school browser and an old school phone, something interesting is happening with the mobile web. Cellphone users either don't bother signing up for web service at all, or if they do they're starting to flock towards devices like the iPhone which can support full web pages without any Mowser-style squashing. The interesting thing about products like Mowser is that they're designed for yesterday's mobile web, not tomorrow's. If Beattie had launched his company in 2004 instead of 2007 it might have been successful. But today the distinctions between the mobile web and the full web are starting to blur, which leaves services like Mowser out in the cold.

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.

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]