Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#391

Post by rootlocus » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:41 AM UTC

kasabali wrote: post #246

GuB-42 wrote: post #181

Putting aside the fact that it is horribly bloated. Accurately measuring RAM usage is tricky, there are several measurements, and no "right" one. It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it. The thing that the task manager doesn't tell you is whether or not these are shared component…

> It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it. You say tomato we say tomahto At the end of the day bloated app is a bloated app its consequences are the same.

10 apss using 100mb each plus 600mb shared use less ram than 10 apps using 200mb each.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#392

Post by preg_match » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:44 AM UTC

torginus wrote: post #384

preg_match wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Explorer crashes for me about ~3 times a day at work, and takes down the taskbar with it, so not sure about more stable. I don't use Nautilus though because it's pretty bare bones compared to Dolphin. Also: > These super-indexed desktop linux search functions are also dog slow Baloo-indexed KRunner on Plasma is instant. I index my entire home folder, including hidden files, and I can substring search with imp…

I'm pretty sure you have a plugin installed for Explorer that makes it crash - while Explorer is far from a perfect piece of software, its not even close to this bad, but it's pretty easy to extend it with COM objects that then run inside the process, that can and do crash the whole thing.

It's a work computer, and from what I see there's no visible plugins. But corporate IT always does some fuck shit (that's a technical term), so I wouldn't be surprised.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#393

Post by welwala » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:44 AM UTC

I'm not surprised. Everything Microsoft makes is web tech now.

And this isn't really new either, they've been pushing for everything web tech since the 90s no less. Remember Active Desktop?

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#394

Post by Scoundreller » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:45 AM UTC

SirMaster wrote: post #361

WarmWash wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it. The program that I use to manage my small business, basically a GUI wrapper on an sql DB is a total delight to use, because everything happens instantly . Even opening it is instantaneous. Modern software is such a bloated mess that you kind of get used to a 20 second start-up and a .25-1 second delay on every action. Then you use something that isn't…

What happens if you keep asking AI to rewrite it to use less and less resources?

tbh, it probably works. I'm vibe-coding a thing and just told it to figure out why it runs so slow: put in some optimizations. It ran some tests and stopped loading an entire-something at opening because there's no value to doing that.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#395

Post by rootlocus » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:46 AM UTC

mrheosuper wrote: post #321

As embedded guy, sometime i wonder what those web devs are doing. A simple app that consumes multiple magnitude more RAM than the entire system i usually working with(~1MB). I assume it just does some HTTP query and render it on the screen, why the heck 1GB of RAM ?

Because that html page needs a full browser to render and browsers have accumulated decades of bloat for everything from webgpu to drm. There's a reason we can't write new web browser from scratch, and why some people are excited for protocols like gemini that you can hack a user agent over a weekend.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#396

Post by wongogue » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:47 AM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #81

eviks wrote: post #25

> By comparison, Apple's native Weather app on macOS reportedly uses less than 250 MB of RAM That's also bloated, couldn't they find a better comparison to illustrate the egregious waste?

My entire kde "plasmashell" which includes my wallpaper and the various widgets installed (including a weather widget) uses 560MB for a screen with 5120x1440 pixels.

To add in the fun, “noctalia” process which is the shell, widgets (including weather :), wallpaper, app launcher, dock etc for my niri-wm setup is using 52MB.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#397

Post by welwala » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:48 AM UTC

SBArbeit wrote: post #120

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…

Another easy workaround:

1. Install Linux with KDE

2. Turn on weather report widget

3. Enjoy :)

PS: You've also solved the mandatory account requirement, adds all over the OS, "Copilot" everywhere, Edge constantly coming back and much more <3

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#398

Post by eknkc » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:49 AM UTC

ed_mercer wrote: post #292

They're pointing to macOS and saying it uses 5 times less RAM there, but is 230MB for a weather app really something to be proud off?

I wonder why it uses 200+ on Mac. It looks like a native (ish) application.

Has a bunch of visualizations and stuff. It might all be graphical assets?

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#399

Post by api » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 5:59 AM UTC

SirMaster wrote: post #361

WarmWash wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI writes code like that, but people get pretty upset hearing it. The program that I use to manage my small business, basically a GUI wrapper on an sql DB is a total delight to use, because everything happens instantly . Even opening it is instantaneous. Modern software is such a bloated mess that you kind of get used to a 20 second start-up and a .25-1 second delay on every action. Then you use something that isn't…

What happens if you keep asking AI to rewrite it to use less and less resources?

It does a pretty good job being put into a loop of "try to optimize for X" then "test and audit your code" then repeat.

Re: Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM

#400

Post by pjmlp » Mon, Aug 10, 2026, 6:19 AM UTC

josephg wrote: post #289

ndriscoll wrote: post #37

My gaming PC that I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and Winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM.

Some of us still know how to write software like that. And enjoy doing it. I made a little conference schedule app a few weeks ago for a conference I was at. I used my own rust UI toolkit, which calls in to cocoa to make use of native UI components. The resulting binary is about 500kb and it uses a couple megs of ram while running. It looks and feels like a totally native iOS app. As far as the OS is concerned, it is…

Yeah, hence why for one kind of like the way RAM prices are going, maybe it forces the industry to re-learn best practices and "bio-programming" instead of "fast-food programming".