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The macOS Dock, this operating system’s version of a taskbar or Start bar, will sometimes bounce icons on it to indicate that something is happening or has happened within the application. This could range from it alerting you to an app that has finished loading, a program that has crashed, or that you received a message. However, it can be quite irritating in the midst of work, or even while watching something on your Mac.
Fortunately, you can turn off bouncing icons on your device. To do this, you’ll need to head into the Dock & Menu Bar settings — it’s called Desktop & Dock on more recent versions of macOS — within the Settings app. You can access this by opening up your Settings app and navigating to the location with the search function. Or you can also use Spotlight (CMD+Space) and type “settings” to go there directly. Otherwise, it’s the following:
- Press the Apple logo in the top left-hand corner of your screen
- Choose System Preferences or System Settings (depending on how recent your version of macOS is)
- Navigate to Dock & Menu Bar on older macOS versions or Desktop & Dock on recent versions, like last year’s macOS version, Tahoe:
- Turn off “Animate opening applications”
- You will then need to either restart your Mac or use the terminal to input (without the apostrophes):
killall Dock;
This will kill the bouncing animation when an application is opening, but not entirely.
How to stop the macOS Dock bouncing system wide
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To ensure that this happens system-wide for all purposes, you’ll need to head into the terminal again. In the terminal, you’ll need to type or copy-paste the following:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool TRUE;
Then, reset the Dock with either another reboot or typing once more:
killall Dock;
This should completely override the macOS settings at its core, allowing you to enjoy your Mac device without any bouncing icons. To revert this for any reason, you only have to run the same terminal command, but replacing “TRUE” with “FALSE” to change the needed value, like this:
defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool FALSE;
macOS isn’t as locked down as some people make it out to be. It’s very controlled, and you certainly have to do a bit of legwork to get it where you’d like, but it can happen. There are also dozens of widget-like Mac menu bar apps that can help you customize your device and some cool new apps that will upgrade your Mac experience, too.
