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Don’t show Dock icons from apps on another device

  • Tagged with macos
  • Posted

The name of this feature is “Handoff”, and that’s where you’ll find the setting for it.

Every so often, an icon appears in my Dock offering to bring across windows or documents I have open on another Mac:

My Dock has two Safari icons – regular Safari, then one that’s annotated ‘Safari from Mac mini’.

I find this quite frustrating, and I often click the wrong icon by accident and end up with a window I don’t want. There’s also no way to dismiss these icons on a one-off basis. Go away!

I looked in the Settings app under Dock, and I couldn’t find a setting that controls this behaviour. I also looked for Continuity (because that’s a marketing name sometimes used for this feature), and finally found it under Handoff.

The setting I had to disable is “Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices”.

When I disable it, I’m warned that this also disables moving my cursor and keyboard to a nearby Mac or iPad, and I think it might affect the shared clipboard too? I’ll see if I’m missing other features in the long run, but in the meantime I have a slightly more peaceful Dock.