How To Fix The Problem Of Icons Disappearing in Your Mac’s Dock

Sometimes certain icons in your Mac dock will just disappear. For example, the Firefox icon might disappear and you’ll see a blank space with just the Firefox name instead of the icon. I’m not sure why this occurs, but it’s some form of corruption to the dock settings file, so you’ll need to reset it. To do so, just do this:

Use Spotlight and look for terminal. Launch it, and run the following commands.
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
killall Dock

There you go, your dock’s good as new. And that’s true actually, there’s a small caveat: This method will reset your dock to how it looked like when you first turned on your Mac for the very first time. So that means you’ll need to drag over all the icons that you want/do not want, but I think it’s a small effort to get the dock back to working condition again.

Alvin Poh

I've over 17 years of entrepreneurship experience, having built a tech company to be the top in the country, which was subsequently acquired for an 8-figure sum. As CEO, I led the company through robust growth to 150 employees across 4 countries. After the acquisition, I embraced minimalism, sold off my personal possessions, and started living around the world. Read more about my story here.

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View Comments

Marjo says:

May 19, 2011 at 11:19 pm

I just experienced this disappearing dock icon phenomenon.

One fix I just tried and which seemed to work: just click and drag the invisible icon (from the space on the dock where it should be visibly residing) and dropped it on the desktop. This removes the application from the dock. Then click and drag a new copy of the application from the Applications folder to the Dock.

So far so good, and it leaves everything else in the Dock intact.