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As technology continues to evolve and take more and more of a place in our daily lives, we need tools to help us manage it. Different companies offer different solutions with differing levels of success, but every device maker that attempts to help users manage screen time all have the same goal in mind: they want to help you keep healthy barriers between you, your children and some of the content that exists out on the world wide web while helping you track just how much time in front of a screen you are logging on a daily basis.
While these services do help us to limit our our own usage of electronics, one of the primary uses for things like Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Family Link are to help parents regulate what sorts of content their children are exposed to. From limiting apps to tracking screen time to putting up barriers for the web, these services can help keep children from experiencing or seeing things online that they simply aren’t quite ready for. Not only is this healthy for our kids, it’s relieving for those of us raising them, too.
Up to this point, parents who have children on MacOS and prefer to use Chrome as their browser haven’t had the ability to govern those experiences they way they would with a broswer like Safari. But that is getting ready to change. Spotted in the Chromium Repositories, Screen Time support is coming to Chrome on MacOS and work is now underway to get things implemented.
This is clearly just the beginning for Screen Time implementation for Chrome on MacOS, but it’s great to see this getting started. Again, it is not as if Mac users are without options, but as Chrome fans, we’re glad to see those restriction options will soon extend to Chrome if users choose to leverage Google’s browser for their web-based tasks. If Google wants to keep Chrome the #1 browser across all platforms, integrating functionality like this is very important moving forward. We’ll keep an eye on the development of this and update when we see it in action on our Mac here at the office.
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