Windows 11’s Weather app is eating 1 GB of your RAM

Checking if it’s raining outside shouldn’t take a gigabyte of memory.

Tests by Windows Latest and Wccftech showed that Windows 11’s default Weather app regularly consumes over 1 GB of RAM, climbing up to 1.6 GB during basic actions like zooming. The culprit: it isn't a native application. It is an MSN web app running on Microsoft's WebView2 framework, spinning up multiple Chromium subprocesses and serving embedded ads alongside the forecast.

Why it matters: On an 8 GB laptop, this single background app can hog nearly 20% of your system memory, forcing Windows to rely on page files and slowing down your PC. For comparison, Apple's native Weather app on macOS reportedly uses under 250 MB under similar conditions.

Know this: Microsoft executive Rudy Huyn stated the company intends to develop more native Windows applications, and Microsoft has claimed it wants to improve performance on low-end hardware. However, it remains unclear if MSN Weather will get rebuilt with native WinUI anytime soon.

Until Microsoft ships a native app, closing Weather might be the easiest free RAM upgrade you get this week.