Forcing Quitting an Unresponsive Program (Updated)

If a program stops responding for a long time, and it doesn't look like it's coming back, you can, fortunately, solve the problem without resorting to restarting the computer or other such drastic measures.

You will probably notice that the cursor changes into a multicolored pinwheel when you hover it over windows for the frozen program. If not, the program is probably not truly frozen.

There are two ways to force-quit a program. The first is to press ⌘-Option-Escape or select Force Quit from theApple menu in the upper-left hand corner. This will bring up a menu of programs that can be force-quit. A hung program will be highlighted in red and marked with (Not Responding).

 

The second way is to select the frozen program in the Dock and hold down the clicker (clicking ctrl+clicker also works) for a couple seconds until a menu appears. Force Quit should be an option. If you have only a normal Quit in the list, holding Option will switch this to Force Quit.

 

Note: While Force-Quiting will not affect any other programs running on your computer, you may lose recent work in the program you forced to quit.