Windows 11's built-in weather app hogs more than 1.2 gigabytes of RAM just to tell the forecast — memory-sucking web wrapper filled with ads masquerades as an actual application
MSN Weather acts as the native weather app for Windows 11 and all it does it run a bunch of Chromium subprocesses in the background to retrieve the forecast data. This causes it to use 5x more memory than the macOS weather app. And, oh, you also get to enjoy ads!
Microsoft's Windows 11 has a weather app that requires over 1.2GB of RAM just to show the forecast. This memory-heavy app is an MSN Weather web wrapper filled with advertisements, giving the impression of an actual application. The app, MSN Weather, is not a true app but a website rendered via WebView 2. It displays accurate data from various providers, including Foreca, but has a significant memory footprint.
In comparison, Apple's native weather app on macOS uses just 250MB of memory. The MSN Weather app is also adorned with ads from Adobe Acrobat, LendingTree, and Spotify. While the app is well-built and aesthetically pleasing, it's not clear if Microsoft has promised to remove the ads when upgrading Windows 11 native apps to Win32, as they did not explicitly state this.
Written by urgent.news from Tom's Hardware's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
