Continuous Force Quit item in Dock's right click menus?

Question

Level 1

17 points

Continuous Force Quit item in Dock's right click menus?

Hi!

I am a very experienced user of MacOS (I am an adept since Mac OS 8)

I have no clue why, and I am very annoyed by the Dock now having a permanent menu item that is called 'Force Quit'. I know the function, I know how to force quit applications for years, but this item being there at the bottom and me having the automatic behaviour of selecting that area just to quit, makes me continuously force quit apps.

Just above it is the conventional 'Quit' item, but why on earth are both options stacked there?

The common behaviour was / should be that an app's 'quit' menu item in Dock changes to 'Force quit' when it got into an unresponsive state. The item changes, never are there both options above each other.

Is this a 'new feature'? Can I get rid of it, since to me it is totally obsolete.

Posted on Mar 28, 2025 2:19 AM

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Answer 1

dialabrain

Level 10

130,735 points

Mar 28, 2025 2:46 AM in response to OlliFlamme

Don't know why you are seeing that. "Force Quit" is normal shown when you option right-click on an open App in the Dock.

Try booting into Safe Mode then restart normally. Sometimes that will fix anomalies.

Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support

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Answer 2

PRP_53

Level 10

94,867 points

Mar 28, 2025 3:49 AM in response to OlliFlamme

There could be something in the main User Account playing up. To further isolate this - Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac.

Then log out of the Main User account and log into the dummy account and test again if the issue persists.

If the issue is present in the dummy account - then, this appears to be a System Wide issue on the computer.

To avoid a session of Q&A, Q&A and Q&A

Download the Application Etrecheck ( External Link ) directly from the Developer.

The Application is Not a " Silver Bullet " and is only a tool to examine the Hardware / Software used on this computer

This is a Diagnostic Tool that makes no changes to the computer Hardware / Software used on this computer

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Answer 3

OlliFlamme Author

Level 1

17 points

Mar 28, 2025 3:19 AM in response to PRP_53

Thanks for the replies.

I forgot to mention: I had already renamed the preference file

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist

and done killall Dock in Terminal.

Dock then reopened with default prefs, but the menu thing persisted.

(FYI: all applications have the double 'Force Quit' and 'Quit' in the Dock menu options. Not sure I mentioned, but I believe you assumed that correctly.)

Gonna try that again with a reboot. Then I'll try the safe mode boot, but I'm afraid (quite sure) that it will not do much to the common boot afterwards however.