There is a battle for the hearts and wallets souls of our young surfing children on the interwebs. Parents are obviously concerned about the appropriateness of the world wide web being a kid's playground, so are looking for suitable controls to help them feel their children are protected online.

We looked at 2 kids browsers, Glubble and Kidzui, and gave them a test spin as well as subjected them to an unscientific kid focus group. Check out our results after the jump.

When Apple said they were going to redesign the Finder, we though, oh, we've heard that before. But with Quick Look and Cover Flow, Leopard introduces the most significant upgrades to the Finder since the 10.1 to 10.2 transition. One of the most time-consuming aspects of using the finder is previewing files. If you're thumbing through a folder looking for a file you need, and the only way to identify the right file is by peeking into it, OS X can really slow you down, at least until Friday when Leopard arrives.

Quick Look is a system-wide technology that the Finder takes advantage of in order to give you fast previews of a file's content within the file system browser. Unlike thumbnail views, which were sloppily implemented and didn't actually work all the time on previous iterations of the OS, Quick Look actually supports all kinds of files, from movies to Keynote presentations and images. Plus, Quick is the name of the game, as anybody who has used Cover Flow on in iTunes will attest.

The other new feature we looked at this morning is Parental Controls, which Apple has amped up by adding to the Preferences window. Historically Apple has done pretty well by allowing parents to designate which applications children can run (and even which web sites they can visit), but with so many cool kid-oriented web sites popping up all the time, it's hard to keep up with the demand. Echoes of, "Hey Dad, can you unlock this web site for me?" can drive a parent bonkers, especially when it's happening five or six times each time your kid sits down to surf.

For the first time, Apple has implemented some content filtering in Safari. They've adapted the anti-spam filter from Apple Mail as a web content analyzer, and apparently it works well enough for blocking "no-no" sites on your kids' behalf. Of course, if you still want to totally lock down your kid's browser, Safari will still allow you to permit only those sites you've approved ahead of time.

Parental controls are good to have these days. There are a lot of sickos out there and the protection of our children online should be at the top of our lists. Social networking giant MySpace announced on Wednesday they are developing a parent notification tool and age verification software. The software, codenamed Zephyr, will be a desktop application. The current MySpace age verification software online does not allow children under the age of 14 to gain access to register for an account, but really, who cant lie about their age? There have been a number of reported cases of minors who have been violated, stemming from their underage MySpace accounts, and MySpace along with parent company News Corp intend to stamp out the chances of minors gaining access to the site so they don't get harmed from their service. No date has been announced for the age verification software's debut.