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I was looking at a baseball score on Yahoo and the page was slow to load.

I noticed that the bottom "notification area" in Firefox said

transferring data from facebook.com

Not only does it trouble me that there is any communication whatsoever between any non-Facebook page and Facebook's servers, this made the page extremely slow (30+ seconds) to load.

Are there any plugins I can run in Firefox to see exactly what is being transmitted to/from the other site? Or are there other ways to figure out what's going on?

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It might be loading an image or other dynamic content from the Facebook servers. If you want to see what is being transmitted, view the source of the page and search for all facebook.com references. Oh, and +1 for being privacy-conscious. We need more people like you in the world, since thanks to Zuckerberg, nobody seems to remember what privacy means anymore. – Breakthrough Sep 15 '11 at 22:40
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3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote

It's probably just the social plug-in they use...

An add-on is Firebug, a web debugger is Fiddler2 and low-level caphuce software is Wireshark.

Not for the faint-hearted though, you need to have knowledge of how HTTP, HTML and Javascript works.

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up vote 1 down vote

Install AdBlock Plus. Then a new icon will appear in one of your toolbars (ABP). When you click it you will see a list of all resources loaded with the page, including external ones. They are mostly ads, social plugins etc. You can quickly disable these from loading by right-clicking the entry and creating a filter.

AdBlock Plus

If you don't like Facebook seeing your activity at other webpages, consider adding the following entries to AdBlock Plus block list (one at a time):

|http://www.facebook.com/*$third-party
|http://static.ak.connect.facebook.com/*
http://connect.facebook.net/*
||facebook.com/connect/connect.php?*

If you only want to see the loaded resources, HttpFox is the other way to go.

By the way, I haven't seen any entries from Facebook in that particular address now (maybe some contents were changed since then).

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up vote 0 down vote

Maybe linking facebook.com to 127.0.0.1 in you hosts-file can solve the problem, if you're not interested in facebook content.

The idea to have facebook-, twitter- and other content on all those pages is inherently wrong. It should be a browser-plugin, not something on every second website.

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