How to quit Chrome with Command+Q on macOS
On macOS, you can use the Command+Q keyboard shortcut to quit an app. This is a universal keyboard shortcut that works in all apps but it seems Chrome has an exception. When you tap Command+Q when Chrome is in the foreground or the active app, you see a prompt telling you to hold Command+Q to quit it. If you hold the keys down for a second or two, Chrome will indeed quit but a simple tap won’t do the trick. Here’s how you can quit Chrome with Command+Q.
Quit Chrome on macOS
As stated before, you can hold down the Command+Q shortcut for a few seconds to quit the browser. You don’t have to learn a new keyboard shortcut to get the job done but it does mean you have to build a new habit, and this habit is only for a particular app. It makes for a strong case to force Chrome to act like other apps. To that end, open Chrome and go to Chrome on the menu bar and uncheck the ‘Warn before quitting’ option in the menu. That is all you need to do. When you next tap the Command+Q keyboard shortcut, it will be enough to quit the app. You won’t see the prompt telling you to hold down the combination of keys, and you won’t need to hold them down either.
Getting Chrome to immediately respond to the Command+Q shortcut means you lose the ability to get a warning when you close the browser. This may be counter-productive if you accidentally end up quitting/closing it. You can always use the Command+Shift+T keyboard shortcut to reopen all previous tabs.
One other alternative you can use is to leave the ‘Warn before quitting’ option enabled but use the Command+Q+Q keyboard shortcut to quit the browser. You basically have to hold down the Command key and tap the Q key twice. This will skip over the prompt you get and quit the browser right away. It has the same problem that holding down the Command+Q option does; learning new, app-specific behavior.
Apple generally doesn’t allow this sort of thing on its platform. For all the criticism it gets for being rigid and closed off, uniform app behavior is one advantage that comes of it. Chrome only gets away with this because the browser is not distributed through the Mac App Store. Still, as far as changing default behavior goes, this is a bit much.
