When you have young children it’s important to monitor their online activity. As my daughter has got older, however, I have reduced the amount of such monitoring I do, giving her more privacy.

At first I used CyberPatrol, which is a paid-for product that will do everything from barring particular websites to time restricting program and internet usage. In time I moved to the free Windows Live Family Safety – this would monitor and restrict internet usage. I also had my daughters email settings send me emails that she received. Now both of these have gone (the latter longer than the former).

Now I no longer restrict what sites she can view but instead rely on being able to check her viewing history. She uses IE as a browser and I can check her viewing history at any point. I also know her email password – and she knows she’s not allowed to change it. In both cases it’s down to spot checks (assuming I make them) which makes it more of a threat of being caught than anything else. None-the-less she’s mature enough now to know what’s wrong and what’s right and that I can give her the level of trust that allows me to do this.

Before you wonder why she doesn’t just clear her viewing history, well, apart from it being obvious that she has, I’ve taken steps in that I’ve created two scripts. These (and they work up to and including IE8) will switch off and on the “General” tab in the Options, which is where the option to clear history exists. This isn’t fool-proof but will certainly do for my needs.

Here’s the code to turn the tab OFF.

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\ Control Panel]
"ProgramsTab"=dword:00000000
"ContentTab"=dword:00000000
"GeneralTab"=dword:00000001
"ConnectionsTab"=dword:00000000
"AdvancedTab"=dword:00000000
"SecurityTab"=dword:00000000
"PrivacyTab"=dword:00000000

And here’s the code to turn the tab back ON.

REGEDIT4
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Control Panel]

Both should be saved as .reg extensions and executed – they need to be run only once.

The first script adds a new entry into the registry and allows you to turn specific tabs off – in this case the General tab, but you can turn off others simply by changing their corresponding dword to 00000001.
The second script removes this new entry and, hence, restores any hidden tabs.

Alternatively, download the scripts here from.

Now, without going into the wrongs and rights of it all, most of my websites follow a familiar theme of being a set width. This blog, even though it’s WordPress, is, as is BMTG and Copy+.

This width is designed to fit on the width of what I deem to be the smallest screen that a reasonable number of people are using (on PC’s – not going into mobile phone handsets and the such). That size, in my belief, is 800×600¹- the initial Asus PC’s, which sold so well this year, were exactly that.

However, the width I’ve been using has been very much a “finger in the air” affair – so much so, that the appearance of a vertical toolbar causes the horizontal one to appear in some cases. Yep, I got it wrong.

I’ve therefore, recently, been doing some research – I wrote a JavaScript program to display the current browser size, and display a horizontal bar in varying lengths. This allowed me to work out how much “real estate” the browser was using up – e.g. launch IE7 and it takes up 21 pixels horizontally. That means whatever your screen size is set to, the web page will 21 less to play this. In fact, IE7 was the worst offender (along with IE6), so that’s become the benchmark²- 779 pixels.

Firefox uses 17 pixels and Opera, well, god only knows – I got strange results. Without a vertical scrollbar, it took up (strangely) 1 pixel horizontally. However, introduce the scrollbar and it took up – the same. It would allow my image to be 799 pixels wide and not bat an eyelid. Make it 800 though and the scrollbar appeared. Why this happened I honestly don’t understand. But I’ve tried a 779 wide page and that works, so Opera is certainly not using up more than the “magic” 21 pixels.

Konqueror uses 19 pixels and Safari (on Windows) is the slimmest at just 15 pixels.

The Copy+ site has already been converted to this new width, and the BMTG site will be soon too.

1. according to Google Analytics this was the 5th most popular resolution used by visitors to the BMTG site [↩]
2. IE does something that the other browsers don’t – it has a permanent horizontal scrollbar. So whether it’s needed or not, it’s there using up the same amount of space all the time. [↩]

I thought I’d check out my site stats to see how Google Chrome is doing (now that I know Google Analytics can track it separately) since it was launched on the 2nd.

The least techy of my sites is BMTG, which garners just 1.67% of users from Chrome. Next up, Copy+ is 3.55%. This site is 5.66%. Not fantastic, but not too shoddy.

Other things that came out in this that Firefox is the most popular browser for this site (it’s IE on the others), Chrome usually has similar percentages to Safari (considering Safari is available on both Windows and Mac, I guess that doesn’t look too good for Safari). Opera is usually languishing in 5th place.

So, Chrome isn’t doing too badly, considering it’s shortcomings. But it is fast and simple, which is what many people want. Having said that, the more tech the site is the more visitors appear to use it. Which in my mind doesn’t go – Chrome is a very un-tech browser.

I guess you just have to be geeky to try something else out and not stick with what you know – many of the visitors were probably doing what I did last week and was just giving the browser a test drive. Time will tell – I’ll try the same again in a few months and see if those percentages remain.