Keep your kids safe on the Web

Do your young children use the internet? Kidzui Firefox Add-on lets you instantly transform Firefox into a bold, kid-friendly browser with good parental controls.

The add-on adds a bright ‘K’ button to Firefox, that when clicked opens Kidzui, a full-screen web browser that can only be closed by a parent. The idea behind this is that parents can leave their kids to play on the internet safe in the knowledge they won’t be viewing any unsuitable material.

On the home page there are lots of child-orientated pages to visit, with games and videos to look at and lots of community features. Your child can create a cool avatar and friends that also use Kidzui can be added. There is also a Facebook-style “status” feature, so they can tell their friends how they’re feeling.

Any site that is not known by Kidzui will be blocked, although parents can add whatever sites they want to the list of allowed destinations. The content on offer from the home page will be pretty attractive to young children especially in the US (it’s mostly aimed at American kids), and there’s nothing to worry parents unless you are not comfortable with advertizing, of which there is some (for movies and DVDs especially).

Kidzui a fairly heavy add-on. When running it’s much slower than Firefox, and if you have a slow computer this could be frustrating. The other problem relates to the target audience. The idea of a browser that locks kids into a safe Internet is great, but it only works if your kids haven’t learned to ‘Ctrl+Alt+Delete’, which still allows you to close whatever you want and open another browser to search the dangerous, unrestricted Internet!

Kidzui is a fun, bright add-on that kids will like, but is not a fail safe against child curiosity. Don’t forget to supervise!