Microsoft has said that it is working to optimize Windows 11 for PCs with 8GB, but its built-in weather app is forecasting stormy weather for its support teams. It turns out that the Weather App has an appetitie for memory and can consumer over 1.2GB of RAM usage. As it turns out the app is actually an MSN Weather app which displays both weather and ads. Testing by Windows Latest showed the unnexpected RAM consumtion but also the wide range of data sources the app depends on for its reporting.
The app is capable of realtime overlays and provides many of the functions one would want in weather forcasting software. Metrics ranging from wind speeds, precipitation percentages, hourly changes, and more are easily seen, along with its ads. However, as also reported, Apple’s Weather App is capable of the same data at a literal fraction of memory costs. Its app uses only 1/5 of Microsoft’s, MSN, Weather app. Laughably the guilty culprit is something that has been a joke among PC users for a long time, namely Chrome or in this case Chromium, it’s open-source version used in the guise of Windows Edge. It’s long been known that Chrome and its siblings are memory resource hogs which is why its no wonder that hardware manufacturers make mention of being able to open as many tabs as you need when they offer significant amounts of RAM.
In this scenario it what discovered that the Weather app had no less than nine sub-processes, all of which were Chromium, so mystery solved on why such a seemingly harmless app behaves like a virtual tribble on the prowl for memory grain. It’s unknown what plans Microsoft may have for the Weather App in regards to its longterm memory optimization efforts now that the truth is out in the open. Trying to bypass its use of Edge, aka Chromium, may not be an easy task and there are of course security concerns in how to allow such an app which depends on internet access, to function outside of the browser but its engineers are at work tuning WebView2 to better optimize its webrowser.
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