Internet Explorer 8 and Parental Controls

I remember when my parents first signed up for cable television.  Even though we didn’t have cartoons 24/7 like we have today, it was still really cool.  Mature programming wasn’t an issue my parents ever had to worry about.  They simply didn’t subscribe to adult channels and made sure we weren’t in front of the tube past 8 pm.  Today, I see a trend where television and the Internet are converging.  The television networks are encouraging viewers to go online to access special programming and enjoy interactive content.  Due to this, my kids are requesting access to the laptop to visit Cartoonnetwork.com.  This has me a bit concerned as I don’t want my kids to get exposed to all of the evil content floating around in cyberspace.  I think it’s important for my kids to go online, but I don’t want them to come across content that is not suitable for them.  Although I supervise them while they are online, I came to the conclusion that it was best to take certain precautions… Time to enable Parental Controls to protect their innocent little souls. 

Enabling the Parental Controls in IE 8 is pretty straight forward.  I created an account for each of my two kid and set the content restriction level.  I logged in as one of my kids and took it for a test drive. In no time at all I found myself extremely frustrated with the browser.  Every time IE came across web content that it couldn’t determine to be safe, it popped open a dialog box prompting for the Parental Controls password.  This got old really fast.  It even prompted me for a password to get to cartoonnetwork.com.  The browser couldn’t determine if that was a safe site.  Really??? 

I convinced myself to continue testing… perhaps there was something weird about cartoonnetwork.com.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the site.  I had the same experience at several sites.  It prompt me for the password to enable certain sections of the front page.  The banner adds needed approval.  The embedded video content needed approval.  The embedded games needed approval.  Just about every section of the site was sourced from some other site and it all needed approval.  But wait, there’s more…The deal breaker came when I logged off from my kid’s account and logged back in with an admin account.  I opened up a browser window to test the experience.  Sure enough, the parental controls were being applied to this account. I couldn’t even visit my banking site without being prompted for the Parental Control password.  The parental control setting is a “one size fits all” approach.  I had no choice but to disable Parental Controls.  I’m going to have to give IE Parental Controls a big “TWO THUMBS DOWN”. 

Note to Microsoft:  Make Parental Controls for IE smarter.  Take into account the banner adds and embedded content that is found in 99.9% of all web sites.  Make it so that we can assign each user a unique level of content management to improve the overall experience.