Forum Discussion
Family Safety parental controls for Edge on Chromium
- We have not released any information on that yet, SeitzM. What controls are you most interested in?
SeitzM looks like there is a new release for Chromium that now supports this through an edge://flags switch - https://techdows.com/2019/06/microsoft-edge-canary-gets-microsoft-family-safety-support.html
i need to get up to the latest chromium release before i can test, so can't confirm this works yet...
tl:dr from the link above:
1. Make you sure you’ve updated Edge Canary version to 77.0.204.0 or higher, visit edge://flags page
2. Search for “Family” and for “Microsoft Family Safety” flag, choose “Enabled”
3. Restart the browser.
chrismrea it looks like this flag has been removed. I didnt actually get it to work anyway when the flag was there
reded23 agreed that it didn't really do much when it was there. the latest version, however, with the upgrade of the OS itself, seems to link it all together finally - i'm seeing both Edge Dev and Beta respecting family controls for the most part. The only thing that seems to go in and out is the inprivate mode, which sometimes is disabled and sometimes comes back
reded23 I'm on v1903, build 18362.327 - it's interesting, actually - i need to test a bit more, but it seems that on first boot, the browser seems to correctly respect family safety, with blocking as assigned in the family safety settings, and blocking inprivate mode. But if the computer goes to sleep and comes back, it seems to "forget" that respect, and allows access to inprivate / movement around safety settings. I assume this is a defect that will be addressed in an upcoming build of Edge, especially since we're getting much closer to full family safety protection.
FWIW, i've set up a multi layered protection scheme:
1) MS Family Safety, with whitelist access only
2) custom hosts file that has an externally curated list of objectionable sites blocked. Setting the user as a non-admin keeps them from changing the hosts file
3) using OpenDNS to block objectionable sites as well - hardcoding those DNS servers on the machine in question
I find this to be a pretty good safety net 🙂 not perfect but workable