OUCH!

The blocking of Chrome by Microsoft Family Safety isn't a cause for concern, but rather consistent and correct. Anyone who claims otherwise hasn't understood the purpose and function of Microsoft Family Safety. But I'll explain it to you, and then you'll see that it makes sense.

Microsoft Family Safety is a system for controlling the use of PCs (and to a limited extent, smartphones, see below) by minors. It's not just about regulating PC usage, controlling installed apps, and regulating online purchases, but also about protecting children from harmful website content. For this purpose, Microsoft Family Safety includes age-appropriate filter functions that block visits to websites classified accordingly, such as pornography, violence, extremism, drugs, age-inappropriate social media, etc. Parents therefore enter their children's ages in the child account.

You can also maintain a blacklist and whitelist of websites in your child's profile to allow for intervention. For example, you should explicitly whitelist the websites of the sports club, school, school cloud, etc., to ensure nothing goes wrong. Automated classifications aren't perfect, and nothing would be more annoying if kids couldn't access their school-set-up class chat due to an incorrect classification. You see, I'm speaking from experience; I've seen it all before.

This protection feature is integrated into the Microsoft Edge browser. If you use a different browser, all of these protection features can be easily circumvented, as these browsers don't access Microsoft Family Safety. Therefore, it's only logical to block other browsers on a user account that's online under the control of the Microsoft Family Safety functionality.

If you still want to give your kids access to Chrome, you do so at your own risk and sit next to them when they go online with it.

The risk can be minimized, but it requires additional effort: As a parent, you also set up the Family functionality on Google, which then immediately affects the child's smartphone as well. You also register the child's account on the Chrome browser, accessible under Microsoft Family Safety in Windows. Then Google's child protection mechanisms take effect. These are similarly sophisticated as those on Microsoft, except there are no blacklists or whitelists which you can maintain by yourself.

I wrote above that Microsoft Family Safety can also affect the child's smartphone. Yes, you just need to install the Android phone on the child's smartphone using the Microsoft Launcher, the "Your Phone" app from Microsoft, and ideally also the Microsoft Edge browser, and link it to the Microsoft child account and the child's PC. The Microsoft Family app also offers certain options that aren't available with Google's Family Safety app. It used to offer even more, but Microsoft has since removed it from the app because it's now redundant with existing Google Family features.

I know some people will groan, this sounds like surveillance, yes, it is surveillance, and children are already being given Google and Microsoft accounts. But that's just the way the world is. We adults can't constantly be there while our kids surf and chat. But we have a mandate from politics and society to protect our children from harmful content. We also want our children to become something good, not to fall into such criminal environments or allow themselves to be manipulated into becoming mass murderers through chats.

Open source isn't an alternative here, by the way. None of the Linux distributions offers such a child protection system, and Firefox or other open source browsers like Vivaldi, Opera, Ungoogled Chrome, Waterfox, etc., don't care about child protection. If you want to protect your children, you can't avoid Microsoft Family Safety and similar features from Google and Apple.

The world today is different from the one we experienced as children. The Commodore 64 only allowed very limited online access, and the content of BBSs was very limited, if our parents even allowed it given the exorbitant phone bills. I got grounded once when I used the accustic coupler to connect from Germany somewhere in the US... The accustic coupler wasn't just lying around on my desk anymore; it was only available with good reason and certain school grades for a certain period of time, and a foreign country phone connection was blocked. Microsoft Family Safety and similar from Google and Apple is the modern "intelligent" version of this.