The Firefox team is committed to ensuring a safe browsing experience for children and comfort for their parents. Through Firefox add-ons, you can add parental controls to the browser, so that your kids can wander freely without opening inappropriate doors. This article provides some information on parental control solutions that have been created for use with Firefox.

• In addition to Firefox extensions, there are many third-party software packages that can filter content through your operating system or at the point where your network connects to the Internet.

Table Of Contents

• Parental control add-ons for Firefox
• Glubble for Firefox
• ProCon Latte
• BlockXXX

Parental control add-ons for Firefox

The following third-party add-ons can be downloaded and installed into your Firefox browser to help to keep your children safe on the Internet.

Glubble for Firefox

• Available: http://www.glubble.com
• Cost: Free
• Description: Family fun browsing for children under 12

Glubble is currently in Beta until the end of 2007 when the final 1.0 version is due for launch.

Glubble is written from the ground up and published by Glaxstar a "Mozilla technology" company who have written popular official Add-ons including, Joga.com companion, del.icio.us classic 1.0, Yahoo! del.icio.us 2.0 and the recently launched, Firefox eBay Edition.

Glubble is specifically written with the objective to drive Firefox adoption to all Family members who want to remotely participate live with young family loved ones activities on line.

It is not a filter-based concept, instead it is based on an "allowed sites" concept, where sites are grouped into "Glubbles." Your family members and friends can help manage your child's GlubbleWorld remotely, while being automatically linked-up to your child from any copy of Firefox with Glubble installed.

For young Children, Glubble changes Firefox's user interface on-the-fly, there are two types of user interface: one for reading age, and one pre-reading age children, both with thumbnail scrolling top bar bookmarks.

Glubble automatically takes out search results from engines like google.com that do not match allowed sites in the your child's GlubbleWorld while showing deep linked results to sites that they are allowed to see which aids your child's discovery of new content.

It has built-in roaming as standard based on one-click sign-in to Firefox. This means that when your child uses it on different computers, they have the same experience and protection on any computer they use. You need to have Firefox installed on each computer, of course, but that is the plan, to spread Firefox to families of young children.

Glubble comes with a pre-installed starter pack of websites, that are suggested as being suitable for children under 12, that your Family can delete and add, to in order to customize what your child can see online. A preview of this starter pack is available to see at http:///www.glubbleworld.com

ProCon Latte

• Available: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/1803
• Cost: Free + option to donate to author
• Description: Filter out web pages containing explicit content based on text on websites; facility to maintain "good" and "bad" lists of websites

Written by Corvineum, this Add-on is based on an earlier one, called BlockXXX. With ProCon, you can manage "white" and "black" lists of sites and pages. You can use wildcards to identify patterns in terms and to use them in the list of sites you manage. For example, you can blacklist all sites that include the phrase, "XXX".

• For more information, see the ProCon documentation page

ProCon holds a list of inappropriate words to remove from a page, and replaces them with asterisks (***). This feature is highly configurable, and is useful for both children and adults. Note that the bad word filter does not block a web site that contains the bad words; you must add the web site to your black list, as described above.

BlockXXX

• Available: When published, BlockXXX will be released here.

Based on information from Parental controls (mozillaZine KB)