It is getting to the time of year when people are visited by a larger jolly gentleman in a red suit that delivers gifts to the good children of world. I have 2 kids who have started to use my PC. This makes me uneasy as I don't want them to do anything I can't easily fix. They are 4 and 2, we have an old celeron laptop that I am going to sort out for them to use. Obviously it will be used with supervision from us, that is a given. I will also be setting the parental controls and making the account restricted and so on. I wondered if anyone knew of any free kid orientated browsers. I have found a few such as kidzui and others that claim to be free, but after digging end up having subscription based models. If such a thing is not available is there any good skins for Firefox, ie or chrome that simplify a browser. We can then add sites to an allowed list within the browser?
There is a whitelist addon for firefox. As for simplifying the browser, I wouldn't bother. Kids learn quickly. They don't need to know what all the buttons do to go to websites and play games or do whatever they will be doing. Also you might be able to utilise profiles in firefox, so that if they mess something up you could restore the profile. (I've never looked in to profiles though so I'm not 100% sure what they are all about) Another alternative would be to put a small linux distro like puppy on a usb pen drive. It boots from the usb drive into memory. You could use firefox on that and every time you reboot its a fresh install, so no one can mess anything up.
Thanks shadow I'll take a look at the whitelist add on. Since I have the celeron sat here I'm happy to use it with the pre installed copy of vista rather than going down the Linux route. Not because I'm opposed to Linux, I'm not I use it on my netbook and I love it. I'm just trying to keep things simple for them. If they balls up their own laptop I can just restore a ghost image with no risk to my PC or Mrs bears laptop. I figured that a more child friendly browser may help as it would give them a more simple interface and make it now engaging for them.
My 4 year old uses firefox on the imac without too many issues, I just have to point him to the page he wants. You can always create a homepage for them with icons to their favourite sites. Safari has an option to do this easily (but then you'd have to use Safari which sucks on the PC) If you really want them to engage in tech then a tablet is ideal, my 4 year old had been using mine for a couple of years and is more skilled on it than the average PCWorld employee. Just don't forget to install netnanny on it.
We got the netbook out to Skype the parents today. The eldest (4 year old) tried to touch the screen to get it to work. It made me a bit sad to be honest. A but later she was using cbeebies and nick Jr sites today navigating them by herself on my pc. It was quite impressive. I guess I'll look at white listing sites and adding icons to bookmarks on the desktop for them to get easy access.
Could configure your celeron laptop to use OpenDNS servers in the TCP/IP DNS settings. Won't matter what browser your kids use http://www.opendns.com/home-solutions/parental-controls/
Why did it make you sad? It's part of the learning process. (s)he'll soon learn that some surfaces are touch screen, some are not, and some aren't 'screens' at all (books!)
