You open your laptop to check if you need a jacket. Thirty seconds later, your Weather app has consumed over a gigabyte of RAM and is showing you ads for insurance. Welcome to Windows 11, where checking the forecast costs more computer problems than editing a spreadsheet — and apparently more than Microsoft’s own stated performance goals can contain.
Tech publications including Windows Latest, Wccftech, and NotebookCheck put the Windows 11 Weather app’s memory consumption between 900MB and 1.6GB during ordinary use — scrolling, zooming, basic interaction. Apple’s macOS Weather app handles the same job at roughly 250MB. That makes Microsoft’s version approximately five times heavier for delivering the same information: temperature, precipitation, wind speed. Not particle physics.
A Browser in a Trench Coat
The Weather app isn’t native software — it’s a Chromium-based WebView2 wrapper around MSN Weather that quietly spawns multiple browser processes the moment you launch it.
The bloat has a technical explanation, and it’s not flattering. Microsoft built the Weather app as a WebView2 shell around its MSN Weather web experience. That means every time you launch it, your system spins up Chromium-based browser processes — plural, sometimes as many as nine visible in Task Manager — just to tell you it’s 72 degrees and partly cloudy.
Here’s what’s actually happening under the hood:
- The app runs on WebView2, Microsoft’s Chromium-based rendering engine, spawning multiple background processes the way a full browser session would
- RAM usage reaches 900MB to 1.6GB during normal interaction — roughly five times Apple’s macOS equivalent
- Third-party ads for products like shoes and medical insurance appear alongside your forecast
- This architecture ships inside a paying too much for a paid operating system, not a free, ad-supported platform
- Similar advertising appeared in Windows 10’s Weather app, making this a long-running pattern rather than a Windows 11-specific oversight
It’s the software equivalent of buying a concert ticket and still sitting through three minutes of ads before the opening act. Except the venue is also quietly borrowing your phone charger.
Microsoft Promised Lighter. The Weather App Didn’t Get the Memo.
The company’s stated commitment to optimizing Windows 11 for 8GB machines runs headlong into a weather utility that can claim up to a fifth of that total memory on its own.
Europe Restricts Microsoft and Microsoft has publicly committed — through Windows and Devices president Pavan Davuluri — to improving performance on 8GB RAM systems. On those machines, the Weather app alone could claim 15–20% of total available memory at peak. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a design choice visible in Task Manager.
If Microsoft genuinely intends to slim down Windows 11, its own first-party apps are the logical place to start. Until that happens, those efficiency promises carry roughly the same weight as a gym membership activated in January.
