Facebook: How do you disable abusive uses of JavaScript?

I am a person who uses Facebook on a daily basis. I noticed over time that unlike other websites of its kind (such as Google+), Facebook heavily abuses Javascript and the abilities of web browsers... to some extent for things they were not designed to do, often in ways that might be a security risk. I've been looking everywhere for ways in which to disable those "features" but unfortunately no search comes up with anything useful.

I basically wish to disable anything realtime except for the chat. This includes whatever they use to generate popups, which supposedly tell you when a new post has been made in a matter of seconds... something only doable by continuously networking data to / from my browser after the page finished loading. Apparently it can even trace where you position your mouse pointer on the screen, and deletes notification server-side based on which elements you happen to hover your cursor over. Popups and open panels also instantly sync in between browser tabs, which again happens without me refreshing the page, implying some sort of snooping script injected into the browser.

This is not okay in my book, and I'm hopefully not the only user who feels that way. If I need to know whether a new post was made by a person or group follow, I can easily refresh the page or wait for an email notification! I don't need these features to use the site, and I'm not happy that my browser is being hacked in order to forcefully implement weird and annoying functionalities for pointless reasons.

Does Facebook have any setting to disable such scripts? If not, is there a way to block JS across the entire facebook.com domain, and will the site still work if I do so? What else can I try to fix this? I use Firefox on Linux, my question is mainly for this browser. Thanks.