Palemoon using hosts file or not?

[ocpaul20]

I hope someone can help with this one:

I am in China where ALL Google sites are banned, so I place all the Google sites in my hosts file so I do not have to wait for the timeout when the website cannot be accessed.
When I look at the bottom status line I can see the websites being accessed so I would expect the ones I have in the hosts file to be looked up and found as 127.0.0.1 and for the browser to quickly move on to the next website to appear in the status line. I have restarted Palemoon after adding these sites to my /etc/hosts file.

The Google website in question is cse.google.com which seems to stay a long time (~30secs - 1 minute)on the status line when it is accessed("connecting to cse.google.com"), so I am guessing that Palemoon is ignoring the hosts file when looking up websites. How can I reduce the time or get Palemoon to look up the website in the hosts file?

[moonbat]

Resolving hostnames is the job of your operating system, not Pale Moon or any other application.

[ocpaul20]

Yes, I know the hosts file is used by the OS.

However, I was under the impression that browsers in general took a copy of the hosts file when they started and that is what I was asking - whether Pale Moon does the same thing?

[Moonchild]

However, I was under the impression that browsers in general took a copy of the hosts file when they started

They don't. They perform DNS lookups like any other internet-enabled applications that needs to look up hosts.
Now, what Pale Moon does do out of a necessity for performance is cache those lookups for a certain amount of time (and so does the O.S. in most cases, for that matter). That means that any changes to it may not be immediately visible in the browser.

[Moonbird]

Restarting the browser helps for me, after I've made some changes to the hosts file while browsing. I use the hosts file successfully with any browser.