Profile Sync Startup Noise

[Ethan Robish]

I get a few requests on startup that appear to be associated with syncing a profile. I do, admittedly, have an account attached under sync because I occasionally want to backup my settings.

Do you have any ideas on disabling these requests in the user file? They seem to go away if I disconnect the account but I'd rather keep it connected and then occasionally just remove the user.js file to let firefox and addons update and the account to sync.

Version: 55.0b11 (64-bit)

[Brian King]

There's a collection of prefs under services.sync.engine.* that should do it. Try setting all of these to "false":

services.sync.engine.history
services.sync.engine.passwords
services.sync.engine.prefs
services.sync.engine.tabs
services.sync.engine.addons
services.sync.engine.bookmarks
services.sync.autoconnect

(ref: https://www.stigviewer.com/stig/mozilla_firefox/2017-03-22/finding/V-57673)

Alternate solution: use separate "profiles" for separate activities. (ref: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Multiple_profiles) Each profile has its own profile directory (and, therefore, its own user.js file, and ... its own copies of any addons, which need to be installed & maintained separately in each profile). You could set up a "testing" profile that doesn't enable sync - at the cost of having to set up and maintain your addons in each profile where you want them. This will definitely resolve your issue, but you may not like the side-effects.

Sync events happen at times other than startup as well: https://wiki.mozilla.org/QA/Sync/Client/Sync_Timers

Here's something you can copy-paste into user.js to test it out

user_pref("services.sync.engine.history", false);
user_pref("services.sync.engine.passwords", false);
user_pref("services.sync.engine.prefs", false);
user_pref("services.sync.engine.tabs", false);
user_pref("services.sync.engine.addons", false);
user_pref("services.sync.engine.bookmarks", false);
user_pref("services.sync.autoconnect", false);

[Brian King]

Did you get a chance to try this out, @ethanr ?