Panther: Old problem with Dock menus still there

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
February 25th, 2004 • 1:24 am

This is a problem that’s been around for a long time, but it’s the first time I experience it in Panther.

All of a sudden, I find that the behaviour of Dock menus on the right-hand side has changed. Normally, when you click on a folder icon on the right-hand side in the Dock and hold the mouse button down, Mac OS X displays a pop-up menu of the contents of the folder. You can then select an item in the menu, and Mac OS X will automatically open it in the appropriate application.

With this bug, however, instead of opening the item in the appropriate application, Mac OS X actually opens a window in the Finder showing the contents of the folder where the item is.

The problem can be fixed by launching the Activity Monitor application, locating the process called “Dock” in the list of running processes, and quitting it. The Dock will then disappear and be automatically relaunched by Mac OS X, and the behaviour with pop-up menus will be back to normal.

Still, it’s a bug that’s been around for far too long, and you cannot expect the ordinary Mac user to know what’s going on and use the fix that I have just described.

It’s yet another one for the “Mac OS X Hall of Shame“. It’s not a big issue, but it’s been around for far too long, and I am quite sure that Apple must have received enough bug reports about it. Why they are not fixing it is beyond me.


Comments are closed.

Leave a Reply

Comments are closed.