OS X Tip - Force Quit Apps From The Dock (With Pic)

by , 2:00 PM EDT, June 15th, 2001

While the next installment of Hot Cocoa will not run until next week, we wanted to give you your OS X fix by offering up a little tip that an astute Observer brought to our attention. We all know that the best thing about Mac OS X is its resistance to crashing. The Unix core's protected memory scheme essentially allots a specified block of memory for each individual application to run in. If something happens with that application, it is contained in a specified area and therefore does not, generally, effect other apps.

This means that when one program in OS X starts misbehaving, users can generally quit the offending application, relaunch it, and continue working as normal. System wide crashes are ALMOST a thing of the past.

Apple provides a number of ways to Force Quit an application if it stops responding. If you are using, say, Internet Explorer and your cursor turns into the Spinning Wheel of Death, but the rest of your apps remain responsive, you probably need to Force Quit Internet Explorer. The two most common ways to do that are:

  1. Go to the blue Apple Menu, select Force Quit..., and shut down the application in question
  2. Use the Command + Option + Escape keystroke to bring up the Force Quit window, and kill the application from there

However there is a third, and arguably far easier way, to force quit an application. If you Control + Option + Click (or Option + Click and hold) on an application's icon in the Dock, you will notice that you now have the option to Force Quit instead of the plain vanilla Quit option usually associated with Control + Clicking on a Dock icon.

This is the standard pop-up menu from a running application in the Dock.

By holding down Control + Option when clicking the icon of a running app in the Dock, users are presented with the option to Force Quit.

While OS X users are spared from system wide crashes for the most part, individual applications still act up fairly frequently. This tip should help you more efficiently deal with the pesky apps when they do.

Apple