--- title: Windows 11's Weather app uses over 1 GB of RAM because... description: Windows 11's built-in Weather app consumes 1.2–1.6 GB of RAM because it's a WebView2 wrapper around MSN's weather website, spawning nine Chromium-based... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/windows-11-s-weather-app-uses-over-1-gb-of-ram-because-it-s-just-a-browser-wrapper-mumvb0m5v twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Windows 11's Weather app uses over 1 GB of RAM because it's just a browser wrapper | daily.dev og:description: Windows 11's built-in Weather app consumes 1.2–1.6 GB of RAM because it's a WebView2 wrapper around MSN's weather website, spawning nine Chromium-based... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/windows-11-s-weather-app-uses-over-1-gb-of-ram-because-it-s-just-a-browser-wrapper-mumvb0m5v og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/mUmvb0m5V.png og:image:alt: Windows 11's Weather app uses over 1 GB of RAM because it's just a browser wrapper og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Windows 11's Weather app uses over 1 GB of RAM because it's just a browser wrapper **[Collections](https://daily.dev/sources/collections)** · 2 min read · 13 upvotes · 7 comments ## Summary Windows 11's built-in Weather app consumes 1.2–1.6 GB of RAM because it's a WebView2 wrapper around MSN's weather website, spawning nine Chromium-based subprocesses. For comparison, macOS's native Weather app uses around 247 MB. This contradicts Microsoft's stated goal of optimizing Windows 11 for lower-end hardware. There's no clear roadmap to rebuild MSN-branded apps as native applications, though Microsoft has expressed interest in migrating Windows 11 components to WinUI 3. ## Content ## The numbers Windows 11's built-in Weather app launches using somewhere between 900 MB and 1.2 GB of RAM. Zoom in on a map or poke around the interface and it can climb to 1.5–1.6 GB. On an 8 GB system, that's nearly 20% of your total memory — for a weather app. For comparison: - **macOS Weather** (ARM): ~250 MB; on Intel Macs, closer to 90 MB - **GNOME Weather** (Linux): ~160 MB - **Mousam** (Ubuntu): ~290 MB - **Typhoon** (Ubuntu): ~240 MB Microsoft's app uses roughly five times more RAM than Apple's, and somewhere between four and seven times more than the Linux alternatives. ## Why it's so heavy The Windows Weather app isn't a native Windows application. It's a WebView2 wrapper around MSN's weather website — essentially a stripped-down Chromium browser running a web app. Open Task Manager while the app is running and you'll find nine or more Chromium subprocesses. That's where the memory goes. This also explains the ads. Because it's just MSN Weather in a frame, the ad inventory comes along for the ride. Apple's Weather app has no ads. Neither do the Linux options. ## The design choice behind it This isn't really a technical accident. Microsoft chose to ship a browser-based, ad-supported app rather than build a native one. WebView2 makes it easy to reuse existing web infrastructure, and MSN Weather already existed. Building a proper WinUI 3 native app would take more work and wouldn't carry ad revenue. That's a reasonable business decision, maybe. But it sits awkwardly next to Microsoft's stated goal of optimizing Windows 11 for lower-end hardware. A weather app that eats 1.2 GB at idle is not optimized for anything. Microsoft has reportedly been interested in migrating some Windows 11 components to WinUI 3, which could eventually fix this. Whether MSN-branded apps like Weather are on that list is unclear. ## Questions this post answers ### Why does the Windows 11 Weather app use so much RAM? The Windows 11 Weather app is not a native application — it is a WebView2 wrapper around MSN's weather website. At launch it consumes around 1.2 GB of RAM, climbing to 1.5–1.6 GB during basic interactions like zooming. It spawns nine Chromium-based subprocesses to display a forecast, which explains the high memory footprint. By comparison, macOS's native Weather app uses around 247 MB under similar conditions. _Developers building Windows apps who want to avoid this pattern track WebView2 vs. native trade-offs on daily.dev._ ### How does Windows 11 Weather app memory usage compare to macOS Weather app? The Windows 11 Weather app uses roughly 1.2–1.6 GB of RAM, while Apple's macOS Weather app uses around 247 MB under similar conditions — approximately five times less. The difference comes down to implementation: the Windows version is a WebView2/Chromium wrapper around a website, while the macOS version is a native application. _Teams deciding between WebView wrappers and native implementations find real-world comparisons like this on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 135 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-09). **TL;DR:** Commenters are broadly critical of the Windows 11 Weather app's 1 GB+ RAM footprint, attributing it to WebView2/Electron-style architecture and ad-driven incentives, while debating what a 'reasonable' memory budget for a modern GUI app actually is. **Sentiment:** 5% positive · 25% mixed · 70% skeptical **The case for** - A workaround exists: pinning the MSN Weather site in Edge with uBlock Origin installed drops RAM usage to ~130 MB and eliminates ads. - Shared system libraries (Qt, GTK, etc.) mean incremental RAM cost for native desktop-integrated widgets can be much lower than the raw runtime size suggests. **The pushback** - The app is essentially a Chromium-based web wrapper (WebView2) rather than a native application, spawning multiple subprocesses and carrying a full browser overhead. - It displays ads inside the forecast feed, which commenters see as a monetization motive that discourages efficiency improvements. - Microsoft's own organizational incentives (per-team KPIs, middle-manager metrics) are blamed for shipping bloated web apps instead of investing in native WinUI rewrites. - Even the comparison benchmark — Apple's Weather app at ~250 MB — is considered bloated by many commenters, suggesting the bar for 'acceptable' is already too low. - Electron/WebView2 being used for multiple small apps simultaneously compounds the waste dramatically rather than sharing a single browser instance. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Strongly critical of the WebView2 architecture and ad incentives, with a lively side-debate about what RAM usage a modern native weather app should realistically require. **Hottest debate:** Whether ~100–300 MB is a reasonable memory budget for a modern native weather app, or whether even that figure is excessive given what lightweight alternatives demonstrate. **Open questions** - Will Microsoft ever rebuild MSN-branded apps like Weather as native WinUI applications? - Why doesn't Windows share a single WebView2/browser instance across all web-wrapper apps instead of spawning one per app? - What is the actual live working-set memory versus reserved/paged memory — is the Task Manager figure the author used accurate? **Highlights** > Microsoft absolutely doesn't need it, but I'm guessing the weather app team (or the core filler apps team or whatever team is responsible for it) needs it to juice a metric to make some middle manager happy. And it makes the middle manager happy because it lets that middle manager report better numbers to their superiors again. Etc. It's why all large dysfunctional organisations do self destructive stuff like this. > — [mort96 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232927) > I think you guys on HN can be a bit out of touch maybe? On my linux machine (measured with tux-manager): nautilus 177 MB kitty 150 MB alacritty 107 MB mpv --idle --force-window 160 MB winit empty window + OpenGL context 100 MB tux-manager 69 MB hexchat 55 MB gnome-terminal 47 MB st 12 MB xterm 12 MB All these apps are what you would consider native, good apps. Written with Qt, GTK, some in low level langs like C\C++, Rust as well. There is of course different ways to measure the usage and maybe some more testing needs to be done, but stuff like 1-10 MB seems completely unrealistic. I think any empty Qt/GTK app eats 40 MB at least. Only thing that even gets close is st at 12 MB. And mind you it's a terminal (which is 1000x simpler than any modern GUI app, doesn't load any assets etc) and it doesn't even use any GPU accel (which itself seem to add a lot of baseline cost). > — [magackame on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49234515) > Easy workaround for this: 1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge. 2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather. 3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar to get a Start Menu icon for the page. 4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon. Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM, with no ads. It's not as nice as a native app, of course, but it's 1000% better than the useless ads and MSN feed that you can't block from the built-in Weather icon. (Also, go into Widget settings and turn off "Discover / Microsoft Start feed". Same crap, different surface. Get rid of it.) > — [SBArbeit on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49234149) > As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that OSes need some sort of OS level GC pool which all GCed languages play in rather than having the language runtime provide the GC. A major part of why these sort of simple applications are taking gbs of memory is because the GC wants to simply grow as much as it can to avoid pauses/jank. There might be 10% of the memory which is actually live in that 1gb. But because it allocates fast enough, the extra headroom is needed. Even if it isn't the case that the GC is universal, having a shared GC amongst runtimes would be a boon in general. If I have 3 JVMs running, I might give them all 1gb of memory even though really each of them only needs 200mb to get their job done. The extra headroom is for when a burst happens. If I could combine all 3 into 1, I could save a lot of allocation overhead and general memory. This does sort of exist in java (war deployments), but there are limitations that make it unappealing. For example, each of the JVMs have to be the same version. > — [cogman10 on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49233992) > A lot of these applications run in Electron or similar libraries where a whole new browser instance, with all its overhead, is stood up for each application. The simplest answer is we need to stop trying to use web technologies as a one-size-fits-all GUI toolkit. > — [ashleyn on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49234416) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232138) · 150 points · 135 comments ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@markozakrajsekgeozs** · 3 upvotes > Did anyone compare how much the app eats on sunny versus stormy days? **@theacademe** · 3 upvotes > And no one was surprised. **@devmandan** · 1 upvotes > Todays forecast: Scattered Ram Droughts **@jasondidathing** · 0 upvotes > Microsoft is in big RAM's pocket. :( **@amizzo** · 0 upvotes > I think the real question is why Chromium takes up so much RAM ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Meta just killed native WhatsApp on Windows 11, now it opens WebView, uses 1GB RAM all the time](https://daily.dev/posts/meta-just-killed-native-whatsapp-on-windows-11-now-it-opens-webview-uses-1gb-ram-all-the-time-lbhn1ok48) · Hacker News · 80 upvotes · 16 comments --- Tags: [#windows](https://daily.dev/tags/windows), [#chromium](https://daily.dev/tags/chromium), [#winui](https://daily.dev/tags/winui) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/windows-11-s-weather-app-uses-over-1-gb-of-ram-because-it-s-just-a-browser-wrapper-mumvb0m5v) ```json 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Zakrajsek","url":"https://daily.dev/markozakrajsekgeozs","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--slY3-STy--/f_auto/v1783585373/avatars/avatar_SbncGJHaRHf7KoebEkT1L?_a=BAMAMicg0"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":3}},{"@type":"Comment","text":"And no one was surprised.","datePublished":"2026-08-09T19:03:00.497Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/mUmvb0m5V#c-3lL0Y7rKU","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"theacademe","url":"https://daily.dev/theacademe","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--C29_q-xW--/f_auto/v1756852849/avatars/avatar_wNAjl1VBaVx2CCjbkkb5h?_a=BAMClqZW0"},"interactionStatistic":{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":3}},{"@type":"Comment","text":"Todays forecast: Scattered Ram 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