catholicsphere

A company who build plug-ins for Firefox has released a Beta version of a new plug-in intended to create a ‘browsing sandbox’ in the Firefox browser that can help keep your kids safer online. (If you don’t have Firefox, you should!)

Here are some of the feature highlights:

• Glubble Trusted Surfing for children under 12 years of age enables families to be sure they only see the best of the web they choose to allow.
• Glubble Altered Search makes Google and Yahoo show results from childrens trusted Glubbleworld instead of the world wide web.
• Child friendly look and feel with interfaces for pre-reading and reading age young children.

It will be interesting to see how this works out. Obviously its not foolproof, and parents who aren’t quite computer savvy should be aware that kids could take the time to disable or breakout of the “glubble” (global bubble) this plug-in creates.

I’m a big advocate of having the computer in a central, open location, rather than stuck away in an uncommon room — especially a child’s bedroom. Coupling this plug-in with proper computer placement (not to mention anti-virus and firewall software to minimize threats from hackers/crackers) so you can keep an eye on your children’s browsing content, I think, could be most effective.

The whole “well they could just open IE” thing could be avoided by uninstalling IE or moving/renaming the iexplore.exe to something else in order to “hide” it and make it difficult to access, especially via shortcuts and Start Menu/Quick Links.

If you actually decide to use Glubble, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. And, if you have some other approaches to keeping your kids safe on the web, please share that.

[tags]glubble, firefox, technology, parenting, internet safety, kids, family, catholicsphere[/tags]