New browser tested:
Basilisk
(by the vendor of Pale Moon)
This one is very similar to the modern Firefox forks. Strangely some settings
(like for accepting cookies) were not even available in Preferences, so I had
to dig into about:config to find a setting to make the visible in the GUI.
Results:
After tightening of setting similar to all Firefox clones, there is
background chattering
BUT this time I decided to dig deeper. Following the procedure suggested by
SuperTramp I still couldn't make chattering disappear. So in about:config I
did some brute force cleaning: I zeroed all variables which contained URLs.
There were 2-3 for which it wasn't possible, I don't know why, but for all
others.
Final result:
+ No background chattering on startup
+ No background chattering on opening preferences
+ Opening https://fsf.org/robots.txt or https://fsf.org communicates only
with fsf.org
All this makes me think that such brute force cleanup in about:config may be
possible for other Firefox clones. However as I haven't read what each
setting does, it may have some other (probably negative) effects. Perhaps we
should read about all that and come up with settings which are both private
and don't affect functionality (if that is possible).
