steam
If I open a link through the steam chat fenster a what I call URL-Filter appears. It notice you that you are leaving the offical steam sites.
I really want to remove that. I know myself when I leave steam and I also know how to recognize phishing sites.
I added here a image of the site I mean:
How can I remove that screen? Keep in mind that I do not really want to install any software, plugins or other strange tools to remove that!
Are there several solutions?
Yes, you can trust it. It is non-intrusive and all it does (at minimum) is manage your games and patches for you. Anything else is optional.
Steam has an offline mode, where you can play your games without a connection to Steam, granting you total freedom from Valve's servers.
It doesn't install anything but the software you need (like DirectX and drivers for example) and the games and patches. Nothing you don't want, unless you don't want the game you're installing. The only downside is that these patches are kind of forced on you, even for single-player games. If the developer decides to 'downgrade' the game or make a change you don't like, there's not much you can do about it.
I'm not aware of any 'independent verification', but the DRM Steam is itself is very harmless, you can choose to run Steam in offline mode and there would be absolutely no way for them to pull access to your game, except for the fact you wouldn't get patches. Any other DRM can be chosen to be used by the game itself of course, but that has nothing to do with Steam.
Anyway, the choice to use Steam has already been made by Square Enix. If you don't trust them, why are you installing the game itself?
With the new released update, you can actually hide Early Access Games from the carousel and the "Recently Updated Box" as well as the "New Games on Steam" Box.
Just click the little customize box and you can choose what to see there. In the carousel, this box only appears once you mouse over it.
Best Answer
Without any software or plugins, it is not possible to circumvent this. Steam does not provide any option to do so.
However, you can use this Grease Monkey Script to bypass it:
Greasemonkey is an addon for Firefox, that lets you modify the contents of any webpage with the help of Javascript. On Chrome, it is called TamperMonkey and maintained by a different developer.