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How do I supress the "sync encountered an error while syncing" bar? I get it every time I connect to a work VPN that is isolated from the internet.

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Background: For work I routinely need to connect to a secure VPN that is completely isolated from the internet. When using it, I can only connect to the servers that reside within the network and the VPN software (Cisco AnyConnect + NAC Agent) seems to automatically redirect all http requests to external sites to a catch-all 'sorry you can't do that' page.

So while connected to the VPN, Firefox Sync doesn't work and nor do I expect it to. However, my issue is that every time I connect to the VPN, Firefox silently pops up a "sync encountered an error while syncing" error message bar at the bottom of the browser, which I have to manually close. This obviously isn't the end of the world, but having to do it all the time gets annoying so I was wondering if there was a way of suppressing that particular error message or maybe getting Sync to handle the secure VPN more gracefully.

Background: For work I routinely need to connect to a secure VPN that is completely isolated from the internet. When using it, I can only connect to the servers that reside within the network and the VPN software (Cisco AnyConnect + NAC Agent) seems to automatically redirect all http requests to external sites to a catch-all 'sorry you can't do that' page. So while connected to the VPN, Firefox Sync doesn't work and nor do I expect it to. However, my issue is that every time I connect to the VPN, Firefox silently pops up a "sync encountered an error while syncing" error message bar at the bottom of the browser, which I have to manually close. This obviously isn't the end of the world, but having to do it all the time gets annoying so I was wondering if there was a way of suppressing that particular error message or maybe getting Sync to handle the secure VPN more gracefully.

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I don't know about blocking that message, but my suggestion is to turn Sync autoconnect off, and use Sync manually.

Type about:config in the URL bar and hit Enter.
Then type autoconnect in the Search bar at the top.
services.sync.autoconnect = double-click that pref to toggle it to false.

Then to trigger a Sync manually, hit Sync Now in the Firefox menu (or the File menu).