I'm using "Hide All Applications" to clear the deck before I set up for a new context.
Sometimes when Safari is open and gets "hidden" by this action, the window that gets hidden goes into a Zombie state.
It's in the menu bar, but the image of it there is transparent. When I hover over it I see the page title, but there's no image of it there. When I click on it to activate it nothing appears to happen, but if I try to click on what's on the screen nothing responds -- it's as if there's a transparent Safari window over the screen!
When I quit Safari the Zombie goes with it.
It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does it's annoying!
This is an odd problem that I haven’t seen myself, so I’m not sure how to suggest a solution. One question, you wrote:
It's in the menu bar, but the image of it there is transparent.
I'm not sure what image you mean… Safari doesn't usually appear as an image in the menu bar… did you mean the Dock?
When you click on the Safari icon in the Dock, does that help?
If you click on the Safari icon in the Dock, does Safari's menu bar menus show up at the top left? If so, what happens when you go to the "Window" menu and select the window that you are trying to use?
Last question / idea: Since there has to be some active application, try this as your "Hide All Applications" action:
Activate Finder
Command+Option+H to hide all other apps
Command+Option+W to close all Finder windows
See if that achieves what you want. If so, see if Safari still exhibits the strange behavior you have seen.
Thanks for the welcome, I've been lurking for a while but I'm digging in deeper now!
Yes, I meant the DOCK.
Some more clues. I seems to happen when I hide all, then open a new safari window. Clicking on Safari only brings up the the newly opened Safari window, but the zombie window will still sit on top of it.
If I look under the window menu for safari only the newly opened window shows up, the zombie is not there.
It's like this window is partially there and partially gone.
So I implemented TJ's suggestion of using CMD+Opt+H and I'm still seeing the issue, though now it's occurring with other apps too.
Here's an example where Slack is invisible! (I can tell it's there because when I hover over it the popup text appears. But when I click on it nothing changes on the desktop!
Yes, running the KM macro is definitely what creates the zombie. It's not always the same app, could be Safari, or Slack, or Chrome or...
All of these apps are permantely in the dock, but it's the window that's a zombie. For instance when the Chrome window (attached) was in zombie mode I could activate Chrome and open a new window, but the window that's zombied won't show.
Did you ever figure this out? It happens to me on occasion. I've found that filing Apple Feedback reports are like yelling at a wall telling it to move. I still file them on occasion, but with a 0% success rate over more than a decade of filing them, I don't expect results.
