The Windows 11 Weather app eats up more than a gigabyte of RAM

Microsoft has long promised to make Windows 11 easier on resources for underpowered machines, yet one of its own built-in apps works against that goal. As tests by the outlet Windows Latest have shown, the stock Weather app can take up more than 1 GB of memory, even though it performs a comparatively simple task.

Five times heavier than Apple's

According to Windows Latest, while displaying a forecast the app topped 1.2 GB of RAM — and that was without any active interaction from the user. The outlet Wccftech recorded similar behavior: consumption typically starts at around 1 GB, drops to 500–600 MB when idle, but climbs to 1.5–1.6 GB during the simplest actions, such as zooming or navigating the interface. On a computer with 8 GB of memory, that means a single app can occupy nearly a fifth of all the RAM.

For comparison: the native Weather app in macOS uses less than 250 MB under similar conditions. In other words, Microsoft's implementation turns out to be roughly five times as ravenous.

It's all about WebView2

The reason, as Windows Latest explains, is that Weather is not a full-fledged native Windows app at all. It's essentially the MSN Weather web app, built on the WebView2 framework. In Task Manager you can see several child processes running simultaneously on the Chromium engine — and those are precisely what balloon the memory usage.

On powerful PCs with 32 GB or more, the problem is unlikely to be noticeable, but on budget systems it can hit hard. On machines with 8 or even 16 GB, launching Weather can strain memory enough that Windows resorts to the paging file more often, and the system starts to feel less responsive.

There's one more reason for criticism: the app's interface has ads built in. According to Windows Latest, sponsored blocks are inserted directly into the forecast feed and styled just like the weather cards. Meanwhile, Microsoft licenses its meteorological data from several providers — among them Foreca, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and regional weather services.

The findings run counter to Microsoft's recent statements about optimizing Windows 11. The company has repeatedly said it wants to achieve better OS performance on weak hardware, and it has updated a number of built-in programs. Microsoft representative Rudy Huyn has also spoken of the intention to develop more genuinely native apps, though whether MSN apps like Weather will be rewritten in WinUI remains unknown.

Source: Hacker News