Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

notebookcheck.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 621 posts

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

#411

Post by raxxorraxor »

welwala wrote: post #397
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

For the Windows look and feel, I recommend Mint + Cinnamon. It took me about 15min to not miss anything on Windows and was shocked how I had forgotten how clean a system can be.

Mandatory Windows accounts can still be circumvented with a console command for Win 11 installations, but the overall enshitification package just got worse and worse.

Cinnamon is X11, but it works very well.

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

#412

Post by [deleted] »

gruturo wrote: post #282
smileybarry wrote: post #278

I don't want to "akshually" this, but on a stock[1] up-to-date Windows 11 x64 25H2 (aka: my desktop) Weather takes up around ~670MB of RAM at launch, not 1GB. While writing this comment it dropped to 450MB. All in all much lower than 1GB. 1: i.e.: not "debloated" or running a bunch of random customizer scripts.

That doesn't take away at all from the complete absurdity of this level of bloat. How is it not 450kB? Fine, a few high res icons and multi language support, let's make it 4MB, because to do it in 1 would take skilled coders.

[deleted]

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

#413

Post by asdfman123 »

brokenmachine wrote: post #376
asdfman123 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a bunch of other requirements you need to meet and no one cares about RAM consumption. So you do it the most time efficient way, not the most memory efficient. Before you scorn, doing it the opposite way, taking more to use less memory, makes you less promotable, not more.

And this is why Windows will have it's lunch eaten by Linux.

Why exactly? Because all the people who really care about good software will switch over? All 1% of the market?

Most people don't care about most things. I don't think much about the vast majority of products I use, because there's only so many things I can track closely. Same goes for everything else. Most people won't look and won't care.

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

#414

Post by asdfman123 »

Alifatisk wrote: post #409
brokenmachine wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why Windows will have it's lunch eaten by Linux.

I’ve read this sentence for more than a decade now.

Honestly it just reveals a poor theory of mind regarding the average consumer.

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

#415

Post by vrighter »

firefoxd wrote: post #36

This took me down a rabbit whole. Why can a simple single purpose app not be just a couple megabytes if not less? The popular options are electron 100MB+, or embedding python3 in your executable which is at least 40MB. But if you build it natively, you should have all of Microsoft tools at your disposition, dlls and such. In theory, this should allow you to make a 1 mb app or less. But in practice, it's the worse opt…

I embed lua when I need it. 200 to 400kb and we're off. And it's infinitely easier to interoperate with c than python is

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

#416

Post by ack_complete »

wasmperson wrote: post #299
afdbcreid wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is far from trivial. Consider the WasmGC proposal, which had a somewhat similar goal. Then C# came and said "we can't use it, we have different needs". So did Go.

> Then C# came and said It's worse than that. The WASM GC standards team was warned in advance that the proposal wouldn't work for .NET, and they moved forward with it anyway: https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/77 They were also warned about Go (though I'm not sure if they ever actually consulted with golang devs): https://github.com/WebAssembly/gc/issues/36 More links: https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/…

No interior pointers, no embedded arrays, and only a subset of Java definitely seems like an odd target. I would have expected at least two different full languages with acceptable porting overhead to be the MVP.

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

#417

Post by smileybarry »

gruturo wrote: post #282
smileybarry wrote: post #278

I don't want to "akshually" this, but on a stock[1] up-to-date Windows 11 x64 25H2 (aka: my desktop) Weather takes up around ~670MB of RAM at launch, not 1GB. While writing this comment it dropped to 450MB. All in all much lower than 1GB. 1: i.e.: not "debloated" or running a bunch of random customizer scripts.

That doesn't take away at all from the complete absurdity of this level of bloat. How is it not 450kB? Fine, a few high res icons and multi language support, let's make it 4MB, because to do it in 1 would take skilled coders.

> That doesn't take away at all from the complete absurdity of this level of bloat.

When the article compares that figure directly to macOS Weather.app's 250MB usage, yes it does. It brings the sensationalist comparison down from "5x" to 2x. Then you can question why both platforms take 250-450MB of RAM for a weather app, instead of just repeating the "windows so bloated" circle again and again.

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

#418

Post by drooopy »

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.

I was replaying Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch 2 and the whole time I was thinking about how this ENORMOUS, open world game originated on the Nintendo Wii, a console with only 88 MB of RAM.

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

#419

Post by v17 »

jaimex2 wrote: post #329
VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that all Chromium browsers are hostile to adblockers and are actively removing them. Use Firefox with uBlock Origin, do not use Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc.

Doesn't Brave have an inbuilt ad blocker?

Brave has a workaround to make some v2 extensions work, including ublock origin

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

#420

Post by zero_bias »

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 used to be shared, but vast amount of insidious attacks like Heartbleed forced web engine developers to force strict isolation between everything
Post reply on HN