New Release: Tor Browser 8.5a11

I don't have Wireshark. There is at least one connection when the security slider is on Safer. On the search results page, a complete version of the following tag is in a sidebar module that shows a summary of Wikipedia's page about the search term:
[geshifilter-code]<img class="module--about__img" source="https://duckduckgo.com/...">[/geshifilter-code]

Procedure:
1. Open the page. Right-click on the page -> Inspect Element -> Network tab. Refresh the page. Click the header of the Domain column to sort it. Look for duckduckgo.com.
2. Right-click on the page -> View Page Info -> Media tab. Click the header of the Address column to sort it. Look for duckduckgo.com.
3. Back in Developer Tools, change from the Network tab to the Inspector tab. In the search box of the Inspector tab, search for substrings of the addresses you found. Ignore "a" tags because prefetching is disabled in TBB's default about:config.

Easy to verify-- temporarily install the Firefox uMatrix and do a search using DDG Onion; watch the uMatrix panel while the DDG Onion results load.
DDG search results now come with their corresponding document type icons. These icons are loaded from DDG clearnet site icons.duckduckgo.com even if .Onion is used.

BTW, uMatrix is an open-source addon that reveals way, way more junk than NoScript.
Also, (optional) you can make it remember your per-site rules.
Finally, its author doesn't have a known "privacy vs. allowed tracking ads" scandal in the past.

Panopticlick suggests otherwise.

@ Nancey:

I thought you might appreciate more detailed instructions:

1. Point your browser at https://www.torproject.org/download/ by clicking on a link if this sentence contains one or by typing that URL into the "location pane" of your browser. You should see a green lock icon indicating that your connection is "secured" by TLS, i.e. you have reason to think your browser will receive files from the real torproject.org not a malicious imitator.

2. Once the download page loads you should see a row of four icons standing for four types of operating systems: Microsoft (Windows), Apple (MacOS), Linux, Google (Android). Below each of these is a smaller link marked "sig".

3. Click on the "sig" for your operating system. After a few minutes you should see that you have downloaded a file with a name like 8.0.8/tor-browser-linux64-8.0.8_en-US.tar.xz.asc

4. Click on the big icon for your operating system. After 5-30 minutes depending on your internet connection speed, you should see that you have downloaded a second file with a name like https://www.torproject.org/dist/torbrowser/8.0.8/tor-browser-linux64-8….

5. Verifying the authenaticity of code before you install is especially important for security critical applications like Tor, but if you can't make steps 6-8 work you can still install Tor Browser; see https://support.torproject.org/tbb/how-to-verify-signature/ for how to obtain the signing key and use GPG to verify the "detached" signature of the "tarball" ***.tar.xz

6. Once you have verified the tarball, make a directory, AKA folder, and move the tarball file ***.tar.xz there. Unpack it (this may be as simple as clicking on it). This will take a minute.

7. Once the tarball is unpacked, you should be ready to start launching Tor Browser, which will painlessly connect your computer to the worldwide Tor network. This will take a few minutes because the Tor "client" on your computer needs to download current information (up the the hour) about all the Tor nodes currently available, so it can start building Tor "circuits". When this is done the browser should launch itself and you can start surfing.

Hope this is all helpful. It's not as complicated as I am probably making it sound. If run into trouble, try asking a friend you trust to help you get TB installed.

That ticket appears to be for a different symptom.

Try https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/30284