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I have to let members of the public use my laptop to access a member signup web page at a student fair in a couple of weeks.

Chrome doesn't have kiosk mode on Mac, is it possible to disable CMD+Q, prevent the title bar from showing up etc..?

Is there software designed for this?

Any other advice?

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  • For what it's worth, I think Kiosk mode is enabled but you have to open Chrome from the command line to pass it the --kiosk parameter. That being said, I haven't been able to pass any parameters successfully.
    – styfle
    May 17, 2011 at 3:42
  • You can hide the title bar with fullscreen mode (cmd-shift-F), but the menus are still all enabled.
    – Matthew Frederick
    May 17, 2011 at 5:55
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    --kiosk isn't enabled in OS X as of yet
    – Pez Cuckow
    May 17, 2011 at 12:41

10 Answers 10

Reset to default
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There's a plugin called Saft which enables kiosk mode in Safari. (Saft has been discontinued as of late 2012; it doesn't work beyond Safari 5.0.5.) If the computer is being used in public, create a new guest user in the system preferences and use this one for the fair. Even if somebody breaks out of the kiosk mode, they can't see your private data or mess anything up.

If you want to stay with Chrome, there's an AppleScript on Superuser, to launch Chrome in kiosk mode.

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  • The apple script isn't real kiosk mode, it's just normal full screen. Thanks for the link to safe.
    – Pez Cuckow
    May 17, 2011 at 12:41
  • Saft link does not seem to be working. Any chance you can update?
    – JBis
    Apr 26, 2018 at 22:05
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Chrome has a Kiosk mode for Mac OS. Sort of. You can pass it command line args to get the kiosk mode as follows:

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --kiosk --app=192.168.168.53

=> This opens a chrome window without any window decorations, maximized to full-screen (like any other Mac App that is maximized.

For all the Chrome command line args check out: http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/#load-extension

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5

Have you considered using Opera as a browser for the signup. It does provide a kiosk mode that is easy to enable:

/Applications/Opera.app/Contents/MacOS/Opera -kioskmode -noexit

The documentation has information about a 'Go To Home' timeout mode that will restore the kiosk after a set interval.

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  • It doesn't work anymore after they switched to Chromium
    – fregante
    Aug 5, 2014 at 17:29
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It's tricky but I managed to get Chrome in a proper kiosk mode. By editing the Chrome's Info.plist in the package contents you can force it to hide the menu bar in presentation mode (set LSUIPresentationMode to 3). The Continue where I left off setting might help.

Use parental controls to block or white list websites.

There is a Chrome plugin called kioskmodehelper that limits tabs and hides ui elements.

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  • Doesn't work in OS X 10.9: bars are hidden but the user can just hit the top and bottom borders and they will show up.
    – fregante
    Aug 5, 2014 at 17:30
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try eCrisper from http://ecrisper.com

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  • This is what we're using. An alternative could be xStand but it's more expensive
    – fregante
    Aug 5, 2014 at 17:31
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If you setup a new user in System Preferences and setup the parental controls to let it have a simple finder then you can allow only Chrome to be opened and you can set it up so that the only webpage allowed to be accessed is your webpage.

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Open Script Editor and using the following:

set strUrl to "https://example.org"
do shell script "/Applications/Google\\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\\ Chrome --app=" & strUrl

tell application "Google Chrome" to activate
tell application "System Events"
    keystroke "f" using {command down, control down}
end tell

This will open a url in app mode as kiosk isn't available on Mac.

It then sends the keys ctrl + cmd + f to enter fullscreen as the older shortcut cmd + shift + f no longer seems to work.

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None of these answers worked for me as a command line solution. I had to pass the URL through the app parameter for it to work.

(MacOS 10.13.4. Chrome 66.)

/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --kiosk --app=http://example.com

*Looks like William's solution does incorporate this in his Applescript.

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  • How does this differ from the previous answer apple.stackexchange.com/a/232074/237
    – mmmmmm
    Jun 12, 2018 at 13:22
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    None of these posted answer work for me, which is why I shared this solution. That command clearly does not pass in the URL through the app parameter and will not work on my system without it. MacOS 10.13.4. Chrome 66.
    – Bijan
    Jun 13, 2018 at 13:14
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http://barbariangroup.com/ Makes a free Mac kiosk WebKit based app called PlainView.

Check it out, it's quite configurable.

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I'm working on a minimalist kiosk webviewer whose only purpose it is to provide a secured container for a predefined url/webapp. Features basically are:

  • Normal-/Kiosk-Mode
  • Optional password protection for leaving Kiosk-Mode
  • Predefined URL (aimed at webapp)
  • Optional Webapp admin URL
  • In-App registration as login/startup application

Could do with some tweaks and further "hardening" but serves its purpose - and it's open source for that matter.

https://github.com/tschiemer/filmothek-kiosk-osx

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