A fancy new feature in Safari 17 that arrived with macOS 14 is the ability to ‘Add to Dock’.
Add to Dock allows you to add any website as an App directly into your Dock so you can open and close it as if it were any other application.
This can be especially useful for websites that do not have a native macOS app, such as Netflix and Threads.
This feature simply opens the app in a simplified Safari wrapper from your Dock but it means you don’t actually have to open Safari to use it.
It’s especially useful for Cloud based services that you use a lot.
An extra handy added feature is that if you were signed into the website when adding it to the Dock, then in most cases you automatically stay signed-in on the app as well.
It is true that Chrome has had a similar function for a long time, but the drawbacks are that:
1. You’ll have to use Chrome, and
2. Chrome still needs to run in the background even though you just want to use the app.
Follow these steps to turn any website into an app on a Mac:
- Make sure you are running Safari 17. Safari updates are released with macOS so you can’t actually download it manually but if you go to the Menu Bar and select Safari > About Safari, you’ll see which version you are on. If you’re on an earlier version of Safari then you’ll have to update to the latest version of macOS via the App Store which is Sonoma.
- Now open the website in Safari that you want to add as an app in your Dock.
- Go to the File Menu and select ‘Add to Dock’.
- You will now see an ‘Add to Dock’ window. Give the App a name of your choice plus the URL you want it to open with.
- Finally, choose the icon you want to give the app. You can choose to go for the default icon or choose one from your own files in Finder.
If you ever want to go back to the Settings for your app to change the customization, just go to the Settings feature in the Menu Bar.
In Settings you can also change the privacy settings, whether you want to allow notifications or if you want to keep Safari’s navigation controls in your app and more.
Note that if you click on an external link in the web app, it will take you to Safari but all internal links should work within the web app.
Any notifications you receive will also appear as a number on the icon in your Dock just as with any other app.
So next time you realize there’s no Mac app for an application you use regularly, creating a web app in Safari is a handy workaround which isn’t as good as a native app but it’s a good compromise.