Microsoft Edge has launched a Kids Mode to keep children safe online.
The tech giant has unveiled the new feature for its recently rebooted Edge web browser, which will make it easier for parents to control how their children surf the web.
Kids Mode is a free option built directly into Microsoft Edge on both Windows and MacOS, and to enable it, users simply need to go to the user profile menu and select “browse in kids mode”.
Parents have the choice between two versions, one for ages five to eight years and one for ages nine to 12 years.
Both options enable the strictest level of tracking prevention in Edge and Bing SafeSearch by default to filter out adult text, images, and videos from search results, but the option for older children includes a newsfeed with curated articles from MSN for Kids.
Kids Mode also restricts what sites kids have access to, with roughly 70 popular kids sites allowed from the get-go, whilst all other sites must be added to a whitelist by their parents.
If a child tries to view a site that’s not on that list, they’re met with a block page which tells them to ask their parents for permission.
In a blog post announcing the news, Microsoft’s corporate VP Liat Ben-Zur called Kids Mode a “game-changer for parents who are juggling all the demands of life today”.
Microsoft intentionally designed it to make adding and removing allowed sites as convenient as possible for parents so that they could have peace of mind when using shared devices.
Ben-Zur added: “[I]t became clear that the best way to keep kids from trying to leave was to make them want to stay. In other words, we set out to create the most appealing environment a kid could ever want for browsing the web.”
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