Though the idea of slowing the websites you prefer, should Net Neutrality fail in congress, is not a good thing, the ability to control which websites will be viewable on your browser is. This may be done for many reasons. If you have kids, you may want to limit their ability to watch salacious material or violence. If you work at home, you may want to limit your ability to go onto websites that are a personal “time suck”, such as Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, and online shopping sites. Depending on your needs, there is a way to completely block these sites, password-protect them, and even to block these sites during certain hours to keep you from using them when you are supposed to be working on something else. Here are the two main ways to block sites on Mozilla Firefox:
1. Parental Controls:
Parental controls are a great way to block sites for kids, and many of them come with the additional ability of blocking sites you don't know about in order to give better protection. Mozilla has a few free add-on versions that can be found at https://addons.mozilla.org/. Windows 7 has a program called Family Safety that you can enable for free on any computer. There are a number of versions for purchase as well, depending on your needs. When choosing the right parental blocking site, here are a few tips to ask yourself:
<ul>
<li>Am I blocking a specific website that I know, or a type of website?</li>
<li>Do I want things permanently blocked, or just for a number of hours?</li>
<li>Do I want a record of sites that my kids are visiting to ensure that they are safe?</li>
<li>Do I want a transcript of chat text kept?</li>
</ul>
These answers will help you to decide the right program for your family.
2. Add-Ons:
If you only want to block a site for a certain number of hours a day, say during working or homework hours, there are add-ons that will create a temporary time block window for the sites you designate. One such program is called Leechblock and is available through the add-on store at Mozilla.
<ul>
<li>Go to the loading site for this program, found at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock/</li>
<li>Click the button that says “Add to Firefox”</li>
<li>Enter the sites and hours that you would like to block.</li>
</ul>
You can go back to the add-on settings at any time and upgrade new hours, new programs, or other tweaks to the program so that you can get the most out of it.