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I have a MacBook Pro that I take from work to my house. I rarely open the lid and almost always hook up to an external monitor.

I frequently find, and I'm unable to find a pattern to consistently reproduce, that I will plug into a monitor and power source, have the MacBook wake up and then discover that several menu options in Google Chrome (where I do about 75% of my work) are grayed out. Right-click context menus are largely grayed out and in particular the Quit Google Chrome item under the Chrome menu is as well.

This means I frequently need to force quit Chrome to shut it down. Clicking Xs to close tabs yields a beep indicating that the UI is in some way blocked, but a CMD+W will successfully close a tab.

Occasionally, I can see the dialog in question flitting on and off screen, fading as it moves, when using Expose, but I cannot get it to relocate to the viewable window area.

I suspect the modal dialog in question is related to a finicky AJAX app that feels compelled to pop up JS alert('...') dialogs when it can't connect to its server. Unfortunately, I have no control over that particular web app, and it's one I use regularly.

As I do work predominantly in my browser, having to force quit and losing 20 (or more) tabs is really frustrating. I've found some Apple Script (or whatever the Mac OS native scripting language is called) scripts people have written to recenter errant windows, but this does not seem to work on modal dialogs.

What are my options for resolving this issue?

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    In 2018 this is still a problem. Modal dialogs are bad design. Usually I get lucky and can find the edge of the modal hanging around the edge of the screen. Something that helps when killing Chrome is the Tabs Outliner plugin which helps me to recover the tabs that died. Mar 7, 2018 at 19:55

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