Windows 11 Weather App Devours a Gigabyte of RAM
Via TechRadar
The Story
The Windows 11 Weather app consumes more than a gigabyte of RAM and serves third party adverts, making Microsoft's own default software an unlikely symbol of what remains wrong with the operating system.
Testing found the app climbing past 1.2GB of system memory, roughly five times what the equivalent Weather app on macOS uses.
The cause sits behind the interface, where Weather runs as a web app spinning up eight separate Chromium processes instead of a lightweight native program.
Alongside the forecast, side panels display full adverts for products like shoes and medical insurance, pulled from the MSN network rather than limited to Microsoft's own nudges toward OneDrive.
The timing lands badly, arriving as a memory price crisis pushes manufacturers back toward 8GB laptops where a single app claiming a gigabyte hurts most.
Microsoft has promised broad performance improvements and less upselling in Windows 11, and stripping the ads out of a basic system app would be an easy place to start.
Testing found the app climbing past 1.2GB of system memory, roughly five times what the equivalent Weather app on macOS uses.
The cause sits behind the interface, where Weather runs as a web app spinning up eight separate Chromium processes instead of a lightweight native program.
Alongside the forecast, side panels display full adverts for products like shoes and medical insurance, pulled from the MSN network rather than limited to Microsoft's own nudges toward OneDrive.
The timing lands badly, arriving as a memory price crisis pushes manufacturers back toward 8GB laptops where a single app claiming a gigabyte hurts most.
Microsoft has promised broad performance improvements and less upselling in Windows 11, and stripping the ads out of a basic system app would be an easy place to start.
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