Four online services to tone down bulky websites
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Surfing the web can become a pain in the a** if you’re on dial-up. And it gets all the more unbearable when you just have to file through the text content of some page, but you’re kept waiting for ages as all the images, flashy advertisements, and clunky widgets keep loading! Well, there are quite a few online websites out there which can greatly strip down big web pages by disabling all the bulky elements in those pages. This really speeds up loading of the page by greatly reducing it’s size, which can also help save precious bandwidth on limited broadband plans.
If the text on a web page is what matters for you, go straight for Finch. As it’s makers say,
Finch makes slow Internet bearable, by stripping away the fat of web pages, leaving just the content. It takes out CSS, images, flash, metadata, iframes, purple mongooses (mongeese?) and more, meaning less for your computer to load. Finch can reduce a page’s size by over 95%, thereby saving a ridiculously big portion of your bandwidth! It comes with it’s cons though – you won’t see images, and AJAX like Facebook or Google Docs certainly won’t work. Logging in to online services isn’t possible yet, either. Mowser does a good job of “mobilizing” a web page by converting the standard HTML to a mobile-phone friendly version. This naturally implies cutting down on a lot of heavy elements, as they would appear out of place on a mobile phone’s small screen. While Finch does a rather aggressive tone-down of a web page, Mowser strikes a good balance between webpage viewing and bandwidth saving. BareSite utilizes the RSS feeds of any website to pull out a list of recent articles published on that site. You can then choose from any of the articles and BareSite will come up with a stripped-down version of the article. Neat. Do you know any other similar website? Share in the comments!
Skweezer acts pretty much like Finch to tone down any webpage, but keeps the external images intact. In addition, the skweezed pages are automatically optimized for mobile phone screens. Skweezer also has a handy feature that shows the kilo-Bytes saved after skweezing a webpage.
