A Web Browser Designed for Kids
Hedgehog Browser filters adult content, blocks YouTube and TikTok, and removes ads at the network layer — before anything reaches the page. Free for Android. No subscription. No extension your child can disable.
A father’s lockdown problem
Hedgehog began during the COVID lockdowns. Schools moved online overnight, and our children could not concentrate on their lessons because YouTube was one tab away. Every five minutes the autoplay feed pulled them away from a maths exercise into a music video, a prank channel, a video about Minecraft. Nothing in the standard browser stopped it.
The official answers all had the same flaw. Screen-time controls let kids see how much time they had left, and they’d use it. Router-level blocks needed a parent to fiddle with admin pages every time the kid changed homework assignments. App-based parental controls came with a £10/month subscription and a dashboard the kid could find and disable. None of them dealt with the actual problem: at the browser level, a curious child is two clicks away from any distraction on the web.
So we wrote a browser that does the filtering itself, at the network layer, where children can’t reach. Hedgehog is the result — the tool we built for our own family, shared with anyone else whose kids need to do their homework.
Protection belongs in the browser, not in the law
The UK Online Safety Act has been introduced under the cover of protecting children — a goal we share. But its mechanism is state-level pressure on every website, with knock-on costs to free speech, anonymous use of the open web, and any small site that cannot afford the compliance burden. The pernicious effects fall on adults; the protective ones could have been delivered another way.
Child protection on the web is most properly done in the network layer of the browser. That way children cannot subvert it (no incognito loophole, no extension to disable), and adults do not need to fiddle with their routers or accept a state filter on their own browsing. Each family chooses the browser their child uses; each adult chooses their own. No legislation required.
Hedgehog is what that looks like in practice. It exists to show a state-mandated filter was never necessary.
The web wasn’t built for children
Hand a child any standard browser and they’re one mistyped URL away from adult content, two clicks from an infinite TikTok feed, and three taps from a YouTube video that rolls into auto-played adverts for sugary snacks and gambling apps.
Most “kid-safe” options are either an extension (kids learn to disable extensions), a subscription service (£10–£15 a month and still gameable), or an entirely separate device. There is a simpler answer: a browser that filters at the network layer, so nothing inappropriate ever loads in the first place.
Filtering at the network layer
Hedgehog ships with a built-in transparent proxy (MITM) baked into the browser. Every web request your child’s phone makes passes through it first. Adult sites, YouTube domains, TikTok domains, ad networks — all matched against curated block-lists and stopped before they leave the device.
There is no extension your child can disable, because there is no extension. There is no incognito mode that bypasses the filter, because the filter sits below the browser tab, not inside it. There is no subscription, because we don’t need to charge a monthly fee to maintain a website list.
The same architecture powers Lunar Browser for general ad-blocking and Jade Browser for privacy — we’ve just pointed it at child-safety lists for Hedgehog.
Out of the box, no setup
- Adult sites — based on the Indian government’s curated block-list, which catches the global mainstream + India-specific sites
- YouTube — full domain block, not a content filter your child can talk past
- TikTok — full domain block
- All standard adverts — same blocker, no nag screens, no “turn off your ad blocker” pop-overs
- Cross-site trackers and behavioural-ad beacons
- Phishing and malware domains
The protection your child can’t talk past
- No extensions to disable, no incognito loophole, no “just open the regular browser” bypass
- Free — no monthly subscription, no 7-day trial that expires into a paywall
- No account required — we don’t collect any data about your child’s browsing
- Built on the same MITM stack that powers Lunar (ad-free) and Jade (privacy) — mature, audited, multi-million-install code
- Data-saver mode — up to 90 % less mobile data per page, useful on a child’s shared family plan