To what websites are the connections made?

Start Firefox in Safe Mode to check if one of the extensions (Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Extensions) or if hardware acceleration is causing the problem.

• Switch to the DEFAULT theme: Firefox/Tools > Add-ons > Appearance
• Do NOT click the Reset button on the Safe Mode start window

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Safe+Mode
• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Troubleshooting+extensions+and+themes

ok, some more info on the problem:

- the website addresses the ff connects to are some that I might have visited and some completely strange/new, this is weird - naturally I thought it could be either AdBlock or NoScript addons so i uninstalled ( removed ) them - still same problem - this does not happen in safe mode - I removed all unused addons ( I have read on the web that even if you disable addons some of them could continue to work in background ) - I can stop the connections all at once just by going offline and back online mode - the rest of the addons I have are all cosmetic, they do not seem to need to connect in or out - these connections do not happen on chrome or opera, this tells me that it's not the router, however I am on public wifi when it happens

+ followed some guidelines from this page: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-automatically-making-connections and I disabled pre-fetching just in case, no change anti malware and anti fishing setting have nothing to do with those spurious website connection addresses... I disabled those just in case with not change

live bookmark connections, I don't have any rss feeds enabled, and those websites are not rss type feeds anyway

again, these connections open all at once only on FF start with only one black home page window ( no websites opened ) , but then gradually drop out one by one over a couple of minutes

I'm perplexed as to why all these connections ?