How to disable Google Chrome's unrequested connections? [closed]

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When chrome is sitting idle in the background, I still see that it sending and receiving packets. How can I disable all unrequested connections of Google Chrome. Firefox is nice enough to tell us all the unrequested connections it makes and how to disable them.

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I am a Google Chrome user who has some experience with this kind of stuff and I'm currently using version 35.0.1916.153. I was looking for a way to stop Chrome's unsolicited chatter and over a period of a day I came up with the following hacks that turned out successfully rendering Chrome virtually silent. This method is easy and ethical and provided by Google's own internal control code. This article is of my own writing and your free to copy it and pass it along if this web servers TOS allows it. You could simply send a link of this page as well.

The goal here is to reduce unwanted background traffic that Google Chrome performs on a continuous basis to and from it's own remote servers by default.

It is a fact that Google insists on sending and receiving unsolicited background traffic without giving the user a way to go offline. I have applied some developer settings that are available from the source code via command line switches. I also disabled all but one users advanced privacy level setting via chrome://settings/

Please be aware the following discussion is applying advanced settings to Google Chrome that may interfere with it's normal function. Google provides Chrome the use of background channels to communicate with between themselves and your browser. For example it may effect things like automatic sign-on's too Google accounts and/or component updates you have set up. If you accept the potential issues or have no need for such things in exchange for reduced background traffic then you could try using the tips discussed below. Run your own tests if you don't like the results reverse the process.

Note that having extensions or loaded web content not considered to the browser as "background tasking" will create a level of normal network activity at any time during your session. This is normal. Be aware of other installed services and applications that are associated with Chrome. You may desire to deal with those as separate issues not discussed in this article.

My results were a 99% total reduction in the amount of background traffic that Chrome uses upon start up and while it sat idle in an "empty session" for the remainder of the day. I observed a very small amount of traffic. Actually only three connections that contained a 7 KB streamed blob of Google SSL certificate verification exchange data to clients2.google.com, a 3 KB streamed blob of an HTTP/1.1 GET /chrome/crlset/xxxx/crl-set-delta-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.crx.data request from www.gstatic.com and finally a 2 KB streamed blob of an HTTP/1.1 POST /service/update2 request to clients2.google.com. 12 KB total traffic the entire session was observed. This exchange may indeed repeat itself over an unspecified amount of time within the same session. I chose not to investigate deeming it insignificant for my situation.

Ok so you may or may not know how to apply command switches to an application that is being launched to run. For those who don't please read carefully.

Use the command switches listed below applied "after the target path" of the chrome.exe beginning with two dashes --followed-by-the-name-of-the-switch. Putting a single-dash between the breaks within the name of the switch if not already present and a space after the path and in between each switch. It is entered in a command prompt at run time. Or you can add this at the end of the target path from Google Chrome's shortcut (properties/shortcut tab). Which is what you use to launch Chrome using Windows 7 (your path to target may differ so apply corrections as needed). Entered within the tab "Target:" window is the following single line example path to launch Chrome.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe" --disable-background-networking --disable-component-extensions-with-background-pages --dns-prefetch-disable

Switch definitions for testing Google Chrome--

--disable-background-networking (This switch disables several subsystems which run network requests in the background. This is normally for use when doing network performance testing to avoid noise in the measurements. This is not default and may interfere with normal browser function.)

--disable-component-extensions-with-background-pages (This switch disables default component extensions with background pages. This is normally useful for performance tests where these pages may interfere with performance results. This is not default and may interfere with normal browser function.)

--dns-prefetch-disable (Disables prefetching of DNS information. Can reduce unwanted network traffic when not expecting it. This is not default and may effect performance.)

Further settings to apply if you want to reduce background traffic:

Access Chromes browser Settings via chrome://settings/ in the address bar or from the control panel to disable the following. (Please note that disabling these settings may reduce security and functionality.)

(-Settings)

(-Show Advanced Settings)

(-Privacy)

(Google Chrome may use web services to improve your browsing experience. You may optionally disable these services.)

Disable -- [ ] Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors

Disable -- [ ] Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar or the app launcher search box

Disable -- [ ] Predict network actions to improve page load performance

Disable -- [ ] Send suspicious downloaded files to Google

Disable -- [ ] Enable phishing and malware protection

Disable -- [ ] Use a web service to help resolve spelling errors

Disable -- [ ] Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google

Enable -- [x] Send a "Do Not Track" request with your browsing traffic

Hope you find this answer useful,

Rob

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From http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/ (hooray Google whackamole):

Try --disable-background-networking?