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

March 15, 2011

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:

  1. Use Spotlight and look for terminal. Launch it, and run the following commands.
  2. rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist
  3. 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.

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