This happens because we kill the Dock (which causes it to restart) to get it to pick up our addition, but (since 10.10) the Dock owns the desktop background.

Trent has said that this also causes minimized windows to be restored.

I found the existence of some private APIs that looked like they would allow us to manipulate the Dock live, without killing it, but I couldn't figure out how to drive them.

There isn't any official supported way to do what we want here.

> I found the existence of some private APIs that looked like they would allow us to manipulate the Dock live, without killing it, but I couldn't figure out how to drive them.

I tried those private APIs out ages ago. They worked in Snow Leopard, but as far as I could tell Apple nerfed them all to fail silently after that. Then, starting around 10.10, killing the Dock would also cause the desktop background to flash.

Operating systems these days only want first-party apps to have the ability to manipulate the user's taskbar/Dock. Windows 10 disables the ability to do this as well, and Chrome now hides from the user any options to create shortcuts there for you.

Installing Microsoft Office would once put things in your Dock, but it uses the "you must restart your computer now" approach.

And upgrading to 10.11 (or 10.12?) would insert Apple Maps in there without asking, but of course that also needs a whole machine restart.

 Issue 267827  was the old app launcher bug about this.

To improve on this, the only thing I can think of is a dialog -- maybe one that automatically triggers when setting the default browser -- which suggests to the user to select 'Keep in Dock', or offers an icon they can drag in manually (not sure how that drag option would work when Chrome is already running though, but it was an idea we floated for the app launcher).

There is one other workaround :-) - we could screenshot the entire screen, put that image up in a temporary window, then do our business, and finally fade that temp window out after waiting a few seconds for the flash to be over.

I'm not a fan of any of this, but…

Deleted: add_to_dock.mp4 1.2 MB

	add_to_dock.mp4 1.2 MB View Download

(Install.framework just wraps some mach stuff to connect to the Dock, it'd be doable without linking to it.)

This issue has been Available for over a year. If it's no longer important or seems unlikely to be fixed, please consider closing it out. If it is important, please re-triage the issue.

Sorry for the inconvenience if the bug really should have been left as Available.

For more details visit https://www.chromium.org/issue-tracking/autotriage - Your friendly Sheriffbot