The Windows 11 Weather App Eats Far More RAM Than You’d Think
Windows 11’s built-in weather app has been found to use well over 1GB of RAM in some tests. That’s roughly 5 times the memory required by the macOS weather app, which uses about 246.7MB.
Windows Latest’s Abhijith M.B. encountered the surprising RAM feast when he opened the app on his Windows 11 PC over the weekend. Task Manager showed Weather using 1,227MB of memory, or 1.227GB.
“Then there were the ads in the Weather app! I have said this before, and I’ll say it again: Windows 11 is not a free OS. It should not be showing more ads,” Abhijith wrote.
Following a separate test, Wccftech reported that Weather settled near 500MB to 600MB after launch but rose to nearly 1.5GB through basic interactions. TechRadar also captured readings between about 800MB and 1GB.
Credit: Wccftech
The blame can be put on Windows apps’ footprint, including WebView2, Microsoft’s Chromium-based web content framework. The original test found nine Chromium-related processes under Weather in Task Manager. Microsoft documents that WebView2 runs a multi-process model with browser, renderer, GPU, audio, and utility processes. This app design can consume more memory than a single-process app.
Not every Windows 11 PC will produce the numbers reported by Windows Latest, Wccftech, and TechRadar; hardware, app versions, loaded data, cache, and other variables can affect memory usage. That said, for computers with 8GB of RAM, a sustained 1.2GB-1.5GB read could place additional pressure on memory.
At the time of writing, Microsoft has not publicly responded to any of these reports.
