Closed Bug 503576 Opened 15 years ago Closed 11 years ago

Built in parental controls for Firefox browser.

Categories

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Product:
Firefox
Component:
General
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

()

Status:
RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 232816

People

(Reporter: murali, Unassigned)

References

Details

Attachments

(3 files)

searches for parental controls v. private browsing
159.72 KB, image/png
Details
Parental controls search trends
621 bytes, text/plain
Details
wot in action
192.02 KB, image/png
Details 
We should provide built in parental controls or   G / PG13 / SAFE browsing for the Firefox browser. In the absence of this I as a parent need to buy a web filter in order to let my kids use FF without exposing them to the web junk.

Look at KidZui extension for FF for an example implementation.
Component: Search → General
OS: Windows XP → All
QA Contact: search → general
Hardware: x86 → All
Version: unspecified → Trunk
This isn't really relevant to the majority of the Firefox user base. As such it's probably a better candidate for an extension, and as you point out some people have already tried that out! I think that makes this WONTFIX.

(Though you may be interested in some bugs we have filed about integration with system parental control features: bug 355555, bug 372920, bug 411927, and a bug about a similar feature request: bug 232816).
(In reply to comment #1)
> This isn't really relevant to the majority of the Firefox user base. 

I beg to differ about the relevancy for the majority of users part. If this were not relevant, there would be no market for web filtering software at 30-60 dollars a piece. 

Additionally, this feature would provide one unique advantage to the Firefox browser that it has a platform agnostic kid safety feature.

Gavin: On a lighter note, if you don't have kids yet, your wife would force you to reconsider your decision [ about safe browsing ] in  six to nine years. It is always better to be proactive :)
Other than bug 232816 , none of the other bugs mentioned in comment #1 are related to built in safe search for FF.
(In reply to comment #2)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > This isn't really relevant to the majority of the Firefox user base. 
> 
> I beg to differ about the relevancy for the majority of users part. If this
> were not relevant, there would be no market for web filtering software at 30-60
> dollars a piece.

That's a strawman argument :) I didn't say it wasn't relevant, I said it wasn't relevant to the majority of Firefox users. Presumably none of us have facts to back any of these bold claims up, but it doesn't follow that existence of a market for the software means that that market is a superset or even a large subset of the Firefox user base, and I would be quite surprised if either of those were true!
relevant to the majority of firefox users, 
or not relevant to the majority firefox users?  

deadlock on this because we don't know, also seems like a bad path for this bug.

Who has the crystal ball of what our user base looks like?  I'd argue we know very little about our 300 million users, or the next 300 million users that we want to reach.

There are people that are interested in studying that.  I've cc'ed a few.

This definitely seems worth study.  I hear the request often in my travels from CeBIT in Germany to FISL in Brazil and everywhere in between, and see it often in lots of feedback channels.

It's also technically hard to do, a complete job of this feature at the browser app level, and requires OS hooks to deliver a sound solution.  A challenge to figure out the technical hurdles and hooks available is also needed to figure out what might be possible.  It might be worth collecting those things in the bug or wiki page if we don't have it already.

We should offer and promote the addon solutions that are out there and maybe create an addon collection at a minimum; but because it does appear that *many*, if not a majority, of firefox users, want this kind of capability.

How good are our addon solutions in this area in meeting current needs?  What is needed to foster continued improvement?

Doing some experiments, gathering some data, and figuring out more about our user base seem like next steps for this bug.

For example how many hits does this article get
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/parental+controls 
and how does that rank in perspective to other featurish kinds of requests on SUMO?

How much interest and traffic might be leaking out from under us on sites like 
http://download-firefox.org/firefox-help/parental-controls-in-mozilla-firefox-3/

Google says there is more interest in "firefox (or mozilla) parental controls" than internet, vista, mac, or free parental controls if I read this right.  

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=firefox%20parental%20controls&cmpt=q

Is that an indication that some of our users are looking for leadership from us in this area?   What would we do about this if it is true?
more questions from the google insights page.

what is behind regional differences in interest in this topic?

also what is behind apparent seasonal differences?  from the looks of it, interest peaks around the end of year holidays or early in the year when we also see our highest active daily user numbers, and its been growing a bit each year.

maybe related to when people acquire new computers and are trying to get them set up?
one other hard balance to strike here is that on one hand we have a population of "privacy sensitive" users that want nothing about there browsing to be observable.

on the other hand we have a population of users that want complete transparency & observability into browsing activities, and even control over what sites can, and can not, be visited (the parents in this case).

These goals are at odds with each other.

And we have no idea about the size of each of these populations.  

This search term insight graph shows that over the last 5 years searches for "parental controls" outnumbers searches for "private browsing" by about 5 or 6 to 1.

http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=parental%20controls%2Cprivate%20browsing&cmpt=q

More questions:

Does the insight chart show that currently there might be equal numbers of users interested in private browsing and parental controls?

Could the inclusion of private browsing features into browsers releases releases over the last year have sparked interest in the area, so now there is equal searching/interest in both topics?  Clearly interest or search on that topic have been much lower in previous years.

If we included or promoted parental controls could we drive the same kind of increase in searching/interest that "private browsing" has enjoyed in the last year?

Would we need to separate versions of the browser to really do a good partitioning and positioning to these two different kinds of users or markets?

Is there some need to combine these features?  e.g.  "I need/want my private browsing; but for my kids I really need/want parental controls.  Oh, and by the way, our family all use the same computer and browser.  Please give me a solution to this problem!"
(In reply to comment #7)

> Is there some need to combine these features?  e.g.  "I need/want my private
> browsing; but for my kids I really need/want parental controls.  Oh, and by the
> way, our family all use the same computer and browser.  Please give me a
> solution to this problem!"

More like this one. There can always be mutual exclusivity. Just as we have Start/Stop Private browsing, we should have a start/stop parental control menu option. Only difference is that to Stop the parental control , one has to enter a password. 

At the time of FF install, we can offer the choice to let the browser offer the set-password-for-parental-control.

This is just a basic thought and I am not making design suggestions.
Also, regarding privacy : Parental control and privacy are not at odds with each other. We let the Parental control option to allow parents to set blocking filters. Among the remaining areas [the safe zone ], why should parents need to audit where the kids are going.
I think your comment 9 suggest that we would have a whitelisting mechanism where only lists on the approved list can be visited.  If we provided that feature then yes, we would not need auditing.   If we had a blocklist feature for the parental control like those provided in many libraries and public systems, then auditing makes sense.

comment 5 suggest starting to spec out what exactly parental controls might look like on a wiki.   that might be the place to iron out whitelist/blocklist options and the controls that are needed.   It would be useful to also point out which of the addon solutions already meet those needs.

comment 8 and 9 also assumes its the same level of effort for private browsing and parental controls with the one difference being passwords on the feature.  I'm not sure I would agree with that.   In most parts of security around systems it is lot harder to preserve integrity and (control) of a system, than it is to "just not do things" or cover tracks by erasing data in the audit trail of activity.

Private Browsing was hard to get right, and there are still a few things that make it not 100% effective  ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=248970&hide_resolved=1 ) ;   

Getting Parental controls right will be even harder.  A lot of kids know how to get around the solutions that are out there now.  

http://computerkid.blogspot.com/2007/09/how-to-bypass-vista-parental-controls.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parental_controls#Commonly-used_methods_to_bypass_parental_controls
capturing that graphic for posterity and demonstration of how a firefox release drew interest to a topic and feature.

prior to that firefox 3.5 beta 2 release where private browsing was introduced, the searches around that topic were no where near the searches in parental controls.  the change in interest is pretty dramatic over the last 6 or 7 months.
It's very hard to tell whether or not this is a common request. I did some analysis in omniture in order to see if the search term is trending, but it appears it's not. The search terms "parental control", "parental controls" and similar consistently account for around 0.2% of the total searches on SUMO. If grouped together, that makes it about the 35th most popular search term (interestingly beating search terms like "flash" and "plugins", although there could be other reasons why those search terms aren't very common, such as the relative simplicity of installing Flash).

See attachment for the complete data.
chofmann raises an interesting point that we (the browser makers) set expectations and create demands for new features; it's probably more common that we create demands by introducing a new feature (case in point: who asked for tabbed browsing before it was invented?). This is especially the case with the Web since it's a relatively new phenomenon where the inventors are the trend setters.

That said, the recent and very dramatic search trend seen in chofmann's attachment 388008 [details] is likely just the result of us introducing the _term_ "private browsing" -- the demand for a way to clear your tracks has existed long before 3.5 beta 2 was released, as evidenced by "clearing private data" being within the top 5 search terms for as long as SUMO has existed.

If the 0.2% of users searching for parental controls on SUMO were to represent the entire user base of 300,000,000 users, there are around 600,000 users wanting this feature today.

It's going to be hard to determine whether this is a common request or not. Maybe as a way to establish good development priorities, we could run a survey asking what new features users would like to see in Firefox and include our already planned features as well as parental controls.
>It's going to be hard to determine whether this is a common request or not.
>Maybe as a way to establish good development priorities, we could run a survey
>asking what new features users would like to see in Firefox and include our
>already planned features as well as parental controls.

Unfortunately for some of these privacy related features people are less likely to report that they find the feature interesting due to implied connotations.  Also two problems that result from a heavy focus on user feedback are:

-bloated software (everyone wants something different)
-bland software (average the user's favorite color to gray)

So I'm actually somewhat hesitant to rely too much on surveys for setting priorities.  A small team of people creating a clear vision for what they want to build (basically the Apple approach) can create products that are more unified and elegant, but it only works if the designers are good.
Yes, that makes sense to me as well. I was mostly throwing some ideas out there while responding to chofmann's SUMO-related question in comment 5 (whether there is relative demand for parental controls). 

No matter how good a designer is, it's impossible to know the right decisions without knowing the target audience. With 300 million users and growing, Firefox is really targeting everyone. That of course makes it impossible to please everyone -- which is why add-ons are so powerful, since it solves the bloated software problem. I personally believe that a good first step here would be to establish how well (or poorly) the existing parental controls add-ons work. Maybe there is already a good solution that we can just feature on AMO, etc? For this, we need parents! :)

Murali, have you tried the extensions listed in http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/parental+controls? Are they useful at all? Btw, should we update that article to include KidZui too?
David, Yes I tried them. Please also include KidZui in the listed extensions.

Thanks
Murali
disclaimer: I'm reading this bug with interest as one of co-founders of Glubble.

However with my Glaxstar hat on I think it is worthwhile thinking about how we can leverage Glubble as an existing add-on out there in the wild to experiment with some ideas.

- Ian Hayward, Founder & CEO Glaxstar
>Maybe there is already a good solution that we can just feature
on AMO

My personal impression is that the great addons out there (like Glubble) are far superior to anything that we could potentially build into Firefox itself because they are so customized, targeted and comprehensive. Protecting kids online is such a broad and complex topic that I think it is actually worth having parents deploy what feels like a whole new browser (as opposed to say just adding a few check boxes in one of our prefpanes).

I believe during the press tour we mentioned these extensions when asked about the obvious implications that adding private browsing to Firefox has for parents.
Not sure if you saw this already - but Lifehacker did a "Hive Five" call to determine the "Best Content Filtering Tool" a few days ago:

Initial Blog Post:
http://lifehacker.com/5312820/five-best-content-filtering-tools

Results:
http://lifehacker.com/5313993/best-content-filtering-tool-opendns

It's interesting to see that OpenDNS received by far the most votes...
Firefox should have a built in parental controls.  Internet Explorer has one.
the more I research into the kind of risks that *all* users are exposed to the more I think I see a need for graduated protection levels and different kind of threat monitoring and control.   Right now we have two.

  phishing protection
  malware protection

there are a lot of risk that don't quite make it to that level, but do expose users to security, privacy, and major annoyance problems.  when you look at the problem that way "child protections" are at extreme end of protections.

the WOT addon for firefox offers an interesting approach to solving this graduated protection control.   

Basic (recommended)

    * Rating icons are shown for all sites
    * Search result ratings are shown in a pop-up window

Light

    * Rating icons are shown only for dangerous sites
    * No pop-ups

Maximum Safety

    * Basic protection with additional blocking of dangerous sites
    * May cause a slight sub-second delay in browsing

Parental Control

    * Blocks access to sites that are not safe for children
    * May cause a slight sub-second delay in browsing 


I just installed WOT and I'm playing with it.  Others that are interested might want to have a look too.

I agree with Alex that this is a broad and complex topic.  I don't think that means that we should give up looking at it.   Some simple light-weight solutions might help children, and really all users, make better choices about the sites they visit.  Bug 512818 has some ways in which our phishing and malware protection are starting to do that.  It might be worth refinement and continuation of that path to extend the protections and advisories progressively further.  That would be a different path that some of the heavy weight blocking solutions that people think about when they think "Parental Controls"
Attached image wot in action — 

    
    

    
  
Duplicate of bug 232816?
Whiteboard: dupeme

    
    

    
  
(In reply to Andre Klapper from comment #26)
> Duplicate of bug 232816?

Indeed recently wontfixed as follows
"We do have some bugs tracking integration with OS-level parental controls (e.g. bug 355555)[1], but we won't build that kind of functionality into Firefox itself. There are add-ons that attempt to address this use case, I think."

[1] parental control bugs - https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?list_id=6806305&short_desc=parental%20control&resolution=---&query_format=advanced&short_desc_type=allwordssubstr&product=Core&product=Firefox
Status: NEW → RESOLVED
Closed: 11 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE

    
  
Whiteboard: dupeme

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