Some Mac users running the MacOS 27 Golden Gate beta have discovered a peculiar bug where they are unable to force quit certain processes or apps, usually if they are errant or unresponsive. I personally have run into this a handful of times with being unable to force quit Safari and Google Chrome, despite the apps being unresponsive and beachballing, and the standard Force Quit approaches do not work, whether that’s the task manager or Activity Monitor, neither of which were able to successfully terminate the errant apps..
If you find yourself with a stuck process on MacOS 27 Golden Gate that will not respond to typical Force Quit measures, you can use the terminal trick below to take care of the problem and successfully terminate the app or process.
How to Force Quit Stuck Apps in MacOS 27 Golden Gate
While we are focusing on MacOS 27 Golden Gate (beta) here because that’s where the standard Force Quit methods are not working, this trick works to terminate any process on any version of MacOS.
- Open the “Terminal” application from Spotlight, or /Applications/Utilities/
- Enter the following command, replacing the application with the name of the app or process you wish to terminate:
- Hit return, then enter your administrator login to use sudo, and hit return again to execute the command
- The process will terminate as expected, force quitting as it should
To terminate “Safari” keep that in place, otherwise replace Safari with the name of the app:
sudo killall "Safari"
To terminate an app with spaces in the name, use the following format:sudo killall "Safari Technology Preview"
(Note the app name must be in quotations to avoid an error in Terminal, as shown in screenshot)
The killall command preceded by sudo terminates any process on MacOS, and not gracefully, so if you have any unsaved data or anything else in the app, expect to lose that. But, terminating a web browser like Safari, Safari Technology Preview, Google Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Edge, etc, will usually – usually, but not always – allow you to resume the prior session of browsing, thereby returning to your tabs and windows.
To add some curiosity to this issue, you might find that you can terminate individual subprocesses of Safari or Google Chrome (ie; “Google Chrome Helper” or the domain specific Safari Web Content processes like “https://osxdaily.com”), but it’s the parent application that is seemingly impervious to being killed by Force Quit or Activity Monitor. Nonetheless, Terminal does the job.
It’s not clear why Force Quit and Activity Monitor is not working properly on some apps processes, but this issue seems specific to MacOS 27 Golden Gate, and it also seems to be process and app dependent. It’s important to remember that MacOS 27 is currently in beta, so not everything is going to work as expected, or as it would in a final stable release, so it’s quite likely any bug in Force Quit or Activity Monitor, or the standard approaches to terminating any app or process on MacOS, will be resolved by the final release. You’ll also want to update to whatever the latest beta version available is, because this is likely to get fixed at an OS level before the final release.
BTW if you are finding that one particular app is repeatedly freezing or problematic, try troubleshooting by terminating the process, updating the app, and even restarting the Mac. And remember if you’re running beta system software or beta versions of apps (like Safari Technology Preview, or Chrome Canary), that is likely to be a factor as well, that will get resolved over time.
Have you run into this issue before where an app is unresponsive, but Force Quit or Activity Monitor can’t terminate the process? Did you use the terminal approach outlined here to kill the process, or did you find another way?
