Mobile? Browser? ... Mowser For Mobility Web Browsing

MOWSER Logo - Image Credit: Mowser.com

Mobile? Browser? ... Mowser For Mobility Web Browsing

The concept of Web 2.0 (the web as used by mobile devices) requires different tools and a better way to see web pages that were originally designed for use on computer displays and have them translate to be easier to understand on the small mobility displays found on smartphones and web enabled PDA's.

We have observed here at Symblogogy about the "designed from the ground up" efforts at web page display through the efforts of .mobi. Here is a web browser designed to take standard web pages and have them become mobility display compatible.

Mowser refers to this process as "Content Adaption" (additional background PDF).

A Google search on the word - Mowser - highlights that initial work on Mowser was done as a research project by Greg Bernhardt, Sean McDermott, and Bun Tan, under the supervision of Prof. Anupam Joshi.

This from CNET's Webware -

Mowser mobilizes any Web page
By Rafe Needleman – April 19, 2007, 3:25 PM PDT

If you[r] 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 up 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.

Original web page display - Image Credit: Mowser.com

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.

Web page display through Mowser browser - Image Credit: Mowser.com

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.
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