[422long]

When I hear about a slow loading site, especially due to many third party includes and dependencies my secondary concern from an operational perspective is what happens when those 3rd party links go down?

Does the page load up as blank? Stop loading halfway through? Very difficult for WashPost to achieve high availability when they only control a portion of the experience.

[guard-of-terra]

When all the 3rd party content is linked properly (i.e. <script> blocks at the bottom of page) - nothing bad happens, you would just see blanks instead of third-party content.

When it's not linked properly (as far as I know most of those 3rd party services by default advertise the "wrong" way) - not only it would display a blank or half-blank page when the 3rd party service is down, also all the page loads are noticeably slower for everyone on every page load.

I.e. I use neither facebook nor twitter nor google+, but half of the internet is loaded a few hundred milliseconds slower because every page is crammed with their fairly useless buttons.

Why useless? First, that functionality should be part of the browser, not of the webpage. I should have a share button in my browser, for every page I see, and also it would prevent those services from tracking me.

Is there an firefox/chrome extension that:

- Provides Like, Tweet, +1, Digg and all the buttons in the toolbar (only ones I need)

- Prevents browser from accessing button embeds therefore disabling tracking?

I would install it in a heartbeat.

[thwarted]

First, that functionality should be part of the browser, not of the webpage.

This is why I prefer a bookmarklet, for the specific (of the 100s possible) social sharing site I happen to like to use.