Kidsbrowse child-friendly web browser software

Kidsbrowse is a web browser for children, which offers the same kind of features you'd expect from an ordinary browser (opening web sites and navigating round them) along with built-in parental controls and other protection.

Many of these features are available as part of Windows, particularly in Windows 7, so does Kidsbrowse offer anything new?

Many of the things it does can be done from Windows itself, but those are not necessarily as easy as they ought to be, mainly because in order to use the built-in Windows parental controls you need to set up user accounts for all the people who use the computer. This is undoubtedly good practice but many people simply run their home PCs with a single account no matter how many people use them.

By rolling everything into a single program, Kidsbrowse removes this extra work and allows users to customise it directly.

It comes with 13 child-friendly websites bookmarked and sitting on the home screen (pictured), each represented by a small picture. Parents can add or remove sites from the home screen by entering a password. Once the screen is password-protected again the browser goes into ‘Kid Mode' so that none of the settings or sites can be changed and only those sites may be accessed.

Adding a new website is a matter of naming it, entering the full address including all the ‘http' bits, using the built-in snapshot tool to create a small picture to be shown on the home screen and then deciding whether you want all the pages of that site to be available to the child, or just the homepage.

The latter part was problematic: when adding a new website to it wasn't at all clear how to set it up effectively for limited page access because there's no guidance. It asked, for example, whether we wanted to "allow pages in parallel directories" with no explanation of what that actually means. There's no built-in help and the feeble online documentation wasn't any use.

A tool in the settings monitors which websites the child visits. There is rudimentary ad blocking included but we couldn't find settings to specify which ones, and again no explanation. It also includes virus and spyware protection, but Kidsbrowse's makers said they couldn't tell us which company provides it or how it works. In any case, your computer's main anti-virus program is likely to provide equal or better protection.

One big problem is that savvy kids can simply use keyboard shortcuts to flip to the Windows desktop and then load Internet Explorer or another browser, avoiding Kidsbrowse's limitations.

We applaud the idea and the basic simplicity but unless your kids are very young, they'll find it far too easy to bypass Kidsbrowse.