Kev,

They have added more and more junk in over time

Yep. Partly "feature creep", mixed with some "advertisement friendly" crap.

though at least, unlike Chrome, you can disable it in about:config
_if_ you can find the setting to change

Yep again. I'm not even sure which changes I made influence which phone
home connections.

On a more modern Linux distro (on a more modern PC) I'm running
the latest FF 52 ESR (52.9).

I'm running 52.5 here (downloaded 4 months ago), on XP.

They're going to stop supporting V. 52 ESR on the 5th of Sep., so then
I'll move up to V. 60(?)
...
At a guess though, I'd be worried about whether it will work on
XP

As far as I know 52 is the last verson that runs on XP.

This has been my valued reference for such matters, already used
in this thread:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transp...y#Web_browsers

Whooperdiedoop! My thanks for that. :-D

strikethru
Looking at that chart I can see FF 60.x ESR (you referred to) is mentioned
there (supporting TLS 1.3), but am fully unsure how to interpret it (if it
will actually run on XP - even though the next columns seems to say so).

And are you perhaps aware of, for FF, a comparision chart showing which
"junk"/features/buildin advertising-friendly crap each version has (getting
a newer encryption is good, but what is it going to cost me) ?
/strikethru

I just remembered that being able to use certain plugins (RequestPolicy and
GreaseMonkey) is pretty-much a deal-breaker to me. A quick peek showed me
that RequestPolicy doesn't seem to work on v57+ ...

Bummer. TLS 1.3 would be handy to have.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser