14 DAY TRIAL // The internet is a big place, and, like all big places it has those shady areas where the wrong kind of people congregates. While for those that grew up with it, the web is a old beast, tamed and docile, for younger people, especially children, the web seems a lot more chaotic, and they are more likely to stray from what they were looking for and come across something you don't want them too see. While the latest version of OS X does have built in parental controls, it is nowhere near a perfect solution for keeping children in the safe areas of the web. To this effect, a dedicated children's web browser, such as BumperCar is a lot better.
What it does
BumperCar is a web browser for children. Aside from having a special simplified interface, it also has a wide range of tools and settings for controls what content your children can and cannot access.
Besides being a filtering tool, it also has a very nice built in flash interface that can help your child get started on its way to finding whatever information they might be looking for.
Safe browsing
BumperCar comes ready to use out of the box, meaning that it already has a lot of filters and extensive lists of sites that are to be avoided and sites that are safe, but all of these can be customized to suit your needs.
At the most basic level you can choose from three preset levels of security. Each one of them has certain restrictions, and each can be tweaked and used as a base for a custom template.
To determine what is safe and what is not, BumperCar looks at the content of the sites that are being accessed. It has a rather extensive list of profanity and words used to describe things that you probably don't want your child to come across, in several languages, as well as commonly used 'internet talk' variations. The program filters not only the sites that are about to be loaded, but also the results from search engines so that the offensive never rears its ugly head. Furthermore, it also lets you prevent the use of personal data that you do not want posted to web sites such as first and last name, phone number and address.
Because some sites will surely always have appropriate content, while others you can bet on always having inappropriate content. The program keeps two lists, a Whitelist and a Blacklist. The white list is grouped by category and is quite extensive; furthermore, it can be updated from the BumperCar site with the latest safe sites for your children. The Blacklist comes a loot less populated, mainly because there are hundreds more unsafe sites than there are safe ones. However, the blacklist does come with the most common sources for images disabled such as the Google and AltaVista mage search engines which provide visual content that cannot be adequately scanned for inappropriate content.
While the internet does not have a rating system that is on par with that of movies or games, there are some sites that do rate their contents. BumperCar comes equipped to be able to take advantage of these ratings and you can specify what ratings are safe for display and which are unsafe. There are three filters to set, sexual content, violent content and explicit language. However, you may opt to allow certain types of sites from overriding these settings, such as artistic sites or educational and medical ones.
Keep track
While all the precautions in the program give a much safer browsing experience, many parents will want to check in every now and then to see what their child is doing. BumperCar lets you do this by providing detailed logs of which sites have been accessed and what files were downloaded and to where.
Additionally, you can choose how to limit the things that your child can do. You can for example limit downloads as there is no way for the program to actually check to make sure that download is 'safe'. Also you can choose to block java scripts and applets and pop-ups whose content cannot be filtered by the program. Because disabling all these things can cause some sites to no longer function as expected, these settings can be ignored by Whitelist sites.
Last but not least, you can limit the hours between which the web may be browsed, and you can also impose a limit of hours per day that can be spent browsing.
The Good
Dedicated safe browser for children that has every precaution to ensure they have a 'safe' browsing experience. Especially built to be used by children it has a simplified and visually appealing interface.
The Bad
All the work that does go on behind the scenes makes browsing painfully slow. There is a significant wait before any page is loaded while it is being scanned to determine if it is safe or not.
The Truth
If you want a browser that is suitable for young children which you can use to ensure that they don't come across any inadequate content, BumperCar is what you need.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
