Windows 11’s default Weather app, a fixture on the taskbar for millions of users, is under fire after independent testing revealed it consumes more than 1.2GB of RAM just to display a simple forecast and map.
The findings, first reported by Windows Latest and later corroborated by Wccftech and Notebookcheck, expose an uncomfortable irony: Microsoft has spent months promising better memory efficiency for Windows 11, particularly on 8GB systems, yet one of its own bundled apps is quietly working against that goal.
The root cause traces back to how the app is actually built. Despite looking like a native Windows utility, the Weather app is essentially MSN Weather repackaged inside Microsoft’s WebView2 framework, meaning it renders content using the same Chromium engine that powers Microsoft Edge.
Testers who expanded the app’s process tree in Task Manager found nine separate Chromium-based sub-processes running simultaneously behind what should be a lightweight utility. Because each of these processes carries its own memory overhead, a task as simple as checking whether it will rain reportedly balloons into a full browser session running in the background.
Windows 11’s Built-In Weather App
Windows Latest recorded the app consuming over 1.2GB of memory almost immediately after launch, with no heavy user interaction involved.
Windows Latest’s separate testing painted a similarly troubling picture: usage jumps to around 1GB at launch, settles to roughly 500–600MB while sitting idle, and then spikes to 1.5GB, with brief peaks near 1.6GB, once a user starts zooming into maps or navigating between forecast screens.
Windows 11 Weather App RAM Usage
On a system with just 8GB of total RAM, a single app absorbing nearly a fifth of available memory can visibly slow down multitasking, especially on budget laptops that remain common in markets like India.
The comparison that has drawn the most attention pits Windows against Apple. Apple’s native Weather app on macOS reportedly uses only about 246.7MB of memory to perform the same basic function, roughly five times less than its Windows counterpart.
Unlike the Windows version, Apple’s app is built as a fully native macOS application rather than a web wrapper, and it does so without displaying any advertisements. Windows 11’s Weather app, by contrast, shows ads styled to blend in with genuine forecast data, adding to user frustration that a resource-heavy, ad-supported experience is baked into the operating system by default.
The timing is awkward for Microsoft, which has publicly committed to making Windows 11 run better on 8GB and 16GB machines as part of broader efficiency efforts tied to future updates.
Reports suggest the company is now planning low-memory optimizations for the Weather app, potentially moving it away from its current WebView2-based architecture toward a more native implementation by late 2026.
Until that arrives, some outlets caution that the “nine processes” figure alone should not be mistaken for a memory leak, since Chromium-based apps commonly split rendering, GPU, and network tasks across multiple processes that release memory once the app is closed.
For users on constrained hardware, the practical workaround is straightforward: disable the Weather widget from running in the background through Windows 11 settings, or uninstall it entirely and switch to a lightweight third-party alternative. Many users have already started migrating to leaner weather apps from the Microsoft Store precisely to avoid the overhead.
Until Microsoft ships a genuinely native replacement, the built-in Weather app remains a small but telling example of how legacy web-wrapper design choices can undercut an operating system’s own performance goals.
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