Let’s face it. Most of us barely remember when we didn’t have the Force Quit option to save us if an application suddenly freezes. In the old days the only choice we had was to restart our computer and hope for the best. Of course, that also meant that any work we may have created and not saved was also lost, but we took our lumps. Fortunately those are indeed the old days.
Dealing with Frozen Apps on Your Mac
For the uninitiated, the Force Quit option is found under the Apple menu.
Force Quit option
When an application freezes you just open Force Quit — which you can almost always do even when things are frozen— click on the frozen app, and click on Force Quit. Your problem is solved.
Force Quit in action
Most of the time. There is a gotcha here. Some things won’t show up in the Force Quit window. Like your Dock. Like some of the utilities you might be using. But that doesn’t mean you are forced back to the old choice of restarting your machine. Apple has another option for you: Activity Monitor.
The quickest way to launch Activity Monitor is to go to Spotlight and enter Activity Monitor in the search field, but you can also retrieve it from the Utilities folder in the Applications folder, if you like to do things the hard way.