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Children are being exposed to the web at a much younger age than before these days. Therefore, keeping them safe while they're online has become ever more important. While software is never a substitute for parental oversight, WOT provides some options that can help make Firefox safer for your kids.

The warnings in WOT can be configured from the add-on preferences. You can select in which categories you are warned and how the warnings are shown. One of the options is to block access to dangerous websites entirely. If you enable warnings for sites that are unsafe for children and enable blocking, WOT will stop Firefox from loading websites that have a reputation for being unsuitable for children:

You can also easily block any website regardless of its reputation by giving it a bad testimony in the child safety category. Similarly, you can unblock a website by temporarily disabling blocking and giving the site a good testimony in the categories where it is considered dangerous.

Of course, this will only prevent kids from accidentally ending up on an unsuitable website. The blocking can easily be disabled from preferences, so it won't stop your older children from surfing where ever they prefer. You should also notice that when blocking is enabled, WOT will load reputations before the website loads, which will cause a slight delay when visiting a new site. The add-on caches reputations, so any subsequent visits to the same site during the browsing session won't be any slower though.

There are nearly a million websites in the our database whose reputation is currently bad enough to get blocked in one or more categories, but still, this is most likely not a comprehensive list of all the sites you'd rather not have your kids seeing. Luckily, WOT makes it easy for our user community to change that. Sharing your knowledge can really help make the web safer for everyone.