Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM
- ID
- 12577
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 09 Aug 2026, 11:11 PM
- Fetched
- 11 Aug 2026, 8:18 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-s-built-in-Weather-app-wastes-more-than-1-GB-of-RAM.1364205.0.html
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 2.5
- Created
- 11 Aug 2026, 9:24 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developers
What happened
Windows 11's built-in Weather app consumes over 1 GB of RAM (peaking at 1.5–1.6 GB during basic interactions) because it is not a native app but an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework, spawning multiple Chromium subprocesses. Apple's macOS Weather app uses under 250 MB for the same task, making Microsoft's implementation roughly five times heavier.
Why it matters
If you ship desktop apps using WebView2 or similar Electron-style wrappers, this is a concrete data point that even a trivial single-purpose app can balloon past 1 GB of RAM due to Chromium subprocess overhead—useful when justifying native or lighter-weight approaches for resource-constrained machines, especially 8 GB entry-level systems where one app can eat 20% of total memory.
Discussion angle
When does wrapping a web app in a Chromium-based shell stop being acceptable for desktop shipping, and what are the practical alternatives for teams that want cross-platform without the RAM tax?