Genre: Web browser for children

Format: CD

Developer: Freeverse Software

Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X v10.2.8, 50MB hard disk space, internet connection

Review Computer: 867MHz G4, 640MB RAM, ATI RADEON 8500, Mac OS X v10.3.4

Price: $49.95

Availability: Out now

Okay, before we start talking about safeguards and censorship and compatibility, let's talk about children. Rather, let's talk about children's entertainment and the fact that the kindly hearted people at Freeverse get it. They're that rare breed of people who understand you can't just give a cartoon animal sun glasses, a skateboard and a ball cap worn backwards and expect him to be considered "cool." "Hey, that dinosaur sure has attitude, but he understands the importance of wearing a mouth guard while bicycling!" That kind of junk is insulting to both kids and the people who raise them.

Before most children are taught by marketers that they have to strive to be cool, they instinctively strive to discover and learn. Of course, like adults, they also strive to have fun. I'm willing to wager that, in many ways, the developers at Freeverse like to have the same kind of fun. How else could they create a web browser with the purpose of restricting access to websites of...uh...questionable content and still make it the most entertaining web browsing experience we've experienced yet?

BumperCar. It even sounds fun (although I feel the grammatically incorrect trend of smashing two words together but keeping capital letters on both is sending a harmful and, let's face it, deadly message to our children). After all, aside from roller coasters and dropping parachute men from those sky cable car things, what's more fun at the amusement parks than bumper cars? Nothing!

BumperCar is fun to look at, too. In fact, we'll start there, focusing on the BumperCar experience as a child would see it. In a moment, anyway. First, I want Freeverse to answer you questions on what's under the BumperCar hood:

BumperCar uses OmniWeb technology from The Omni Group, providing the stable cocoa foundation necessary for any modern Mac Web browser. It also uses Apple's WebCore and JavaCore frameworks that are built into Mac OS X, just like Apple's Safari. WebCore is one of the most standards-compliant page renderers available on any platform. As these frameworks improve, BumperCar inherits their improvements.

BumperCar handles the following technologies elegantly, without the need for installing extra plug-ins: HTML, XML, XHTML, DOM, CSS, Java, JavaScript, QuickTime, Flash, and Shockwave.

Now, upon launching BumperCar, kids are presented with a colorful bumper car arena, of sorts. There are five categories here—science, math, fun and games, civilization, and language—each filled with approved websites relevant to that category. There's also a "tunnel of mystery." Ian Lynch Smith at Freeverse explained to me in that this was added to bring back the exploratory days of the Internet. Some of you may not remember, but there was a time, not too long ago, when the Internet was about discovery, not about selling products. The Tunnel of Mystery harkens back to those days. Click on it, and who knows what'll come up? Only two things are certain: it won't be selling products and it'll be safe for children.

Tangent alert. Google has this Froogle thing now which is specifically for finding products to buy, making it useless for real web searching. I'm wondering when someone will develop a search engine database that automatically excludes all stores. Nothing can be sold on a site in this search engine, it's only for real, by God, research and information. In other words, if I'm searching for Flash Gordon, I might find actual content about the character's history or audio clips from the movie, not hundreds of sights offering to sell me the DVDs or action figures.

Okay, back to BumperCar. Children aren't restricted to the main categories and the sights therein for web surfing. They can enter a URL in the address bar just as anyone else can, and they can add frequently visited sites to their bookmark list. Parents or organizations can set up home pages in each category with easily accessed customized links. A particularly nice touch is that, when setting this up in preschool mode, the browser window automatically takes up the whole screen so that younger children won't be able to click on the desktop. This'll reduce plenty of headaches for school/library tech support personnel.

Speaking of tech support, that's pretty much the role that parents/administrators will play with BumperCar. It's your settings, after all, that determine just how high the security level is and what methods are used to implement it. Some of this is simple. Say, for instance, your child wants to visit kirkhiner.com (and why wouldn't he?). It's not on the whitelist (as determined by dmoz.org and edited by Freeverse), so a warning appears when the child tries to visit it. Two options are presented: add it to the whitelist or head elsewhere. If you want to add it, simply click the button and type in your password (BumperCar uses your Mac OS X administrator password) and you're good to go.

You can easily add sites to the whitelist, and your listings can be exported and imported for easy transfer from computer to computer. You can also determine how far removed from the whitelist your children are able to venture. Sticking with kirkhiner.com, let's say I link to Applelinks. That's one step, which you may want to allow without having to approve it. I'm generally not one to link to the naughtiness, after all. Applelinks isn't either, so you may want to allow two levels of removal from the whitelist. However, who knows what sites are linked to from those to which Applelinks has links. It snowballs, and since you can't determined what junk will get picking up in that snow, you can control how far the snowball rolls, for a bit. The maximum number of linked sites is five.

The blacklist is a bit easier to manage. Quite simply, if you know of a site that your child shouldn't be accessing, add it to the blacklist. Just because it's in the approved whitelist doesn't mean you'll want your child accessing it. MTV.com is on the list, for example, but there's no way any child of mine will be able to visit that site. Not because I think they're vulgar or pornographic or anything, but because I blame them for allowing corporations to take over rock and roll. And hey, BumperCar is sort of a grounding for the Internet age. If there's a site your children particularly like, simply add it to the blacklist for a week or two as punishment if your children are bad. It's kind of like denying them their favorite TV show or movie, and it's more productive than simply keeping them off the computer, which they may need for other things.

The levels of protection don't stop there, not by a longshot. First, if you really don't want to muck about with the options, you can simply select High, Medium or Low security and be done with it, trusting Freeverse to have handled the rest. Chances are, though, if you're this worried about shielding children from the nastiness of the web, you'll want to be a bit more specific. First, you can filter search engine results that may contain questionable content. You can also filter out profanity, and you can define what you consider profane. Freeverse has included a default list, and...uh...it's pretty thorough, even including some popular misspellings. For a good laugh, read through that list sometime. Honestly, 90% of those words I'd never even heard of, or at least hadn't thought of using them in that manner.

You can also type in words, numbers and phrases your child is not allowed to enter in forums, chat rooms and such. For instance, you can block your home phone number, address, child's name, credit card numbers, etc.

The ratings area allows you to define the degree of protection against sexual content, violent content and explicit language. You can also block entry to unmoderated and/or moderated chat rooms and from websites that promote discrimination, gambling, drug abuse, etc. You can, however, tell BumperCar to allow educational, medical, artistic and sports sites through these filters. The problem with all of this, of course, is that you're trusting site operators to correctly identify their content. Not always a safe thing to do.

You can get into the technical side of things as well, determining whether to allow Javascript and Java applets, to allow access to the included games (Airburst, Mancala and Reversi, all of which are child friendly), and to accept cookies. You can prevent files from being downloaded and banner ads from being displayed. You can even control the hours of the day during which your children are allowed to access the net and control the total number of hours they're allowed to surf.

And finally, you will always have access to the history files so you can see exactly what your children have been seeing. One other nice touch; when the security settings window is open, you do have access to all sites. As a reminder, an "Unrestricted" watermark is thrown across the browser window to make sure you don't accidentally leave the security settings open.

Sound a bit Big Brother-ish? It is, and it's unfortunate that it has to be this way. Is there violence, language and sex in movies, in the papers and on the evening news? Yes, but it's not nearly as nasty or degrading as that which can more easily be found on the web. It's also not as dangerous in that movies, TV shows and newspapers aren't a two way method of communication...you don't have to worry about your children talking back to those who are providing the content.

Of course, there's nothing better for child supervision than actually supervising your child. However, the only people who argue that parents should watch their children 100% of the time are people who don't have children (or who are pretty creepy in their own right). Often, it's better to let your children explore and learn on their own. There's a lot of worthwhile information on the web, and it can be a great tool for both education and fun. Aside from disconnecting the modem and throwing the computer out the window, unfortunately, there's no foolproof method of insuring your children won't surf to a site they shouldn't see. With BumperCar, though, you'll be able to rest much more easily...

...and you won't have to make them wear a mouth guard to do it.