Family Safety needs to be installed. It is part of the Windows Live application suite and can be installed by launching the Windows Live setup or by downloading Family Safety separately from the Microsoft website.

Each Family Safety account has basic web filtering and activity reporting enabled by default.

To take full advantage parents need to visit the Family Safety website to edit those settings. It does for instance make sense to set the filter for young children to strict so that only child friendly websites can be accessed. Available filter settings are:

• Select Strict to block all websites that aren’t child friendly or on the allow list.
• Select Basic to allow websites except those with adult content and anonymizer websites.
• Select Custom to allow and block website categories manually.

Children have the option to notify their parents if a website could not be accessed requesting it to be added to the list of allowed websites. Other options include the ability to manage a child’s contact list. This can be set to allow the child to maintain the contact list or give only parents the rights to add new contacts to it. The activity reports give an overview of the websites that have been visited in the past.

Family Safety is an interesting option for parents who cannot be with their children all the time when they use the computer. It only makes sense to use on the other hand if no additional tools (e.g. web browsers or instant messengers) are accessible by the children.

Multiple services are available in the other website information categories as well. The best part is that these information can be easily accessed. Options are to display a toolbar in Firefox that displays some of the information right away and offers one-click access to everything else. Not everyone wants to use a toolbar on the other hand. That’s why there is also the possibility to right-click on a link to display the information in a overlay window. An overall rating is displayed on top of each category that is computed from the results of all single results.

The add-on does not slow down the web browsing experience noticeably.

Overview of the services offered by Link Extend:

• Safety – Web of Trust, McAfee SiteAdvisor, Web Security Guard, Browser Defender, Norton Safe Web, DrWeb, Compete, Google Safe Browsing
• KidSafe – Web of Trust, Alexa, Browser Defender, Web Security Guard, Google SafeSearch, ICRA
• Ethics – Scryve, Knowmore, CorporateCritic
• Site Traffic – Alexa, Quantcast, Compete, Statbrain
• Thumbnails – GooglePreview, MyThumbnail, Websnapr, Thumbshot

Link Extend comes with extensive settings that can be configured in the add-on’s options. This includes removing services that are not needed, configuring how and where thumbnails are displayed, setting up context menu entries, configuring search engine options that include hiding unsafe options, toolbar options and if suspicious or unsafe websites should be added to the Firefox browsing history.

Link Extend is compatible with several search engines including Google Search or Yahoo Search. It might take some time to configure the Firefox add-on properly but the process should be worth it for many users who like to be on the safe side when surfing the Internet.