We have K9 installed on our computer at home. It’s free to use and the way we have it setup is that my wife has her own personal email account only she knows the password for and we use that email for the filter so if you request a password reset the request is sent to her email (obviously only she has the password for the filter itself).
The filter blocks bad sites in general, with like 3 levels of increasingly strict blocking, and you can personalize it to block other sites that it doesn’t automatically block (I think you might be able to allow certain sites too but not sure). You can also block the internet entirely for certain parts of the day. So the way we do it is that to use the internet at all my wife needs to put in the password for regular surfing and then she would need to enter the password a second time to view a site that is normally blocked.
When you enter in the password you can choose a time limit on it of 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15, 30, or an hour. You can also log in to see a list of when the password has been entered as well as any site exceptions viewed and when. If you clear out the list then it shows the last time the list was erased. Once you have the software installed on your computer I think it works on all browsers (we use microsoft internet explorer and mozilla firefox and it for sure works on them). Also, if you are running your machine on windows and you create another user profile the K9 will still block on there. One big setback though is that if somebody puts on the password and you put the machine to sleep before the time limit expires, when you wake it back up it will still be available. If you shut the computer off completely then when you restart it the password needs to be put on again.
While it’s not perfect (no filter is) it works pretty well, especially if you employ some of the extra customizations I’ve mentioned. Keep in mind – this is all for a desktop or laptop. If you are using an iphone or Ipad you can download the K9 browser but there are a LOT of ways to get around it on these devices – namely just downloading the app of some other browser. Also while you can disable the youtube app or the default safari browser app, the app store itself has a lot of pritzus available on it. We had one of these devices for a while but ended up getting it out of the house because of these setbacks and also the kids were getting way to addicted to it (our 2 year old was starting to figure out how to use as well as we could for finding pictures and his games on there… a little scary). So for now we just have a laptop with the above mentioned K9 setup.
I’m thinking of also signing up for another free service called Covenant Eyes which complies a list of all questionable sites viewed on a computer (maybe all sites in general, not sure) and will email it to a list of people you choose. That way even if you find a way to get around the filter, whatever you end up looking at will be sent to somebody you know. I’m thinking that this in addition to the K9 will create a pretty good combination that will be pretty hard to get around should temptation knock. The best solution is obviously to just get the internet out of the house completely, and b’ezrat Hashem we’ll work ourselves up to that eventually.
Hope this all helps.