Windows – Firefox asks for proxy details, but only when accessing facebook

firefoxPROXYwindows xp

At work, all requests are forwarded to a central load-balancing, caching Squid proxy server. If I try to access Facebook from within Firefox, I get the standard proxy authentication dialog:

The proxy moz-proxy://<IP addresss> is requesting a username and password. 
The site says: "moz-proxy://<IP Address>"

However, this dialog comes only for facebook & only when accessed from Firefox – any clues as to why this happens? Accessing from Internet Explorer or Chrome works fine, and yes Facebook is not blocked.

Just Firefox gives this problem. I have installed NTLM Auth for Firefox addon, but it hasn't helped.

The proxy settings are set to auto detect, same as in Internet Explorer & Chrome.

I'm using the current stable version of Firefox, 10.0.2 on Windows XP SP3

Best Answer

Most probably, your proxy is blocking the WebSocket protocol. Chrome before version 14 and IE don't support it, so they are not affected.

Go to the URL about:config, search for the key network.websocket.enabled and switch it to false.