Glubble Makes Firefox Browsing Family Friendly

As Nick Gonzalez of TechCrunch says: The internet can be a crazy place for adults and even a dangerous place for kids. As more and more children are growing up with the internet as a part of their lives, parents are forced to deal with how let their children get online while still saying safe.

Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft have implemented family friendly search features. Startups like IMSafer have taken on protecting kids on IM. Glaxstar's new startup, Glubble , goes an additional step by making the internet a safe place to browse for children. Since going to any site is easy as a click with a number of ads pointing to adult sites, use of Glubble would prevent accessing those adult sites. Glubble is a Firefox plug-in (3.8 MB) will allow the parents to control a white list (or a safe list) of which domains their kids can visit and browse.

Glubble initially has a list of 350 approved domain properties like Disney.com or Nickelodeon, but parents can add other domains not in this list or also combine their lists with preexisting lists approved by other parents. It is for children under 12, for kids older than 12 this may not work, because they may use Internet Explorer to visit the domains, which doesn't have the plug-in like Glubble. But for children who are still learning the web place, Glubble will be of great help, so they don't accidentally visit strange sites.

When a parent installs the plug-in, they create logins and passwords for each of their family members as adults, young children, or pre-reading children. All these accounts and the white lists of domains define the "Glubble". When the Firefox is started it will ask the user to sign. Parent will be able to access the whole list and plug-ins in Firefox but children will get the white list with all the plug-in deactivated. They will see a thumbnail slide show of sites they can visit.

When the children try to access a site that is not in the list, it not only tells the children they can't visit the site but also allow them to get parent's permission to access the site. The parent then can approve the site, either the link or the whole domain. Glubble is very flexible, it can be edited anytime and new domains added or existing domains removed easily. It also has a chat service, where the children can chat with others with parent's permission, and then they can chat within the browser.

Gonzalez also says: As the service grows, Glubble will let parents give trusted friends the ability to approve sites in their Glubble or create community generated lists by combining with other Glubble's white lists.Glubble is offered as a free service for now, they may charge later for subscribing to a moderated list of safe domains generated from the communities list and company's approval.

Glubble is yet another great plug-in for Firefox and will help children have a safe web browsing experience and adults can rest easy and worry less.