MacOS Mojave shows recent apps in the Dock. Here's how to hide them

You'll find this new addition as either helpful or something that crowds your Mac's Dock.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor

Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.

Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms

See full bio

Matt Elliott

July 15, 2018 3:07 p.m. PT

macos-mojave-recent-apps — Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

In addition to Stacks, Dark Mode, a new screenshot tool and an improved Finder, MacOS Mojave has added a new element to the Dock. It now shows your three most recent apps.

This story is part of WWDC 2022, CNET's complete coverage from and about Apple's annual developers conference.

This new recent-app section sits between your collections of app icons on the left and the section of the right that shows your open apps.

If you've got your Dock set up just so, then you might not want this new recent-apps section crowding your Dock.

Watch this: We took a spin around MacOS Mojave public beta and here's what we found

02:07

Hide recent apps in Dock

The new recent-apps section is smart enough that it shows only recent apps that aren't already in your Dock. It can be helpful to return quickly to an app you recently closed, but since I have my Dock loaded with all the apps I use with any regularity, it has basically been stuck showing me icons for Pages, Dictionary and Preview.

I rarely open Pages, open the Dictionary only by accident and only open Preview by clicking on a screenshot or PDF. Thus, these recent apps sitting day after day in my Dock are not useful to my Mac workflow.

Thankfully, you can disable the feature. Here's how:

Go to System Preferences > Dock and uncheck the box at the bottom for Show recent applications in Dock.