Windows 11 Weather App Uses 1.2GB of RAM Why Microsoft Web Apps Are Bloating Windows.
A recent investigation by tech publication Windows Latest revealed that the default Weather app bundled with Windows 11 can consume up to 1.2GB of RAM an extraordinarily high memory footprint for a basic system utility. Additionally, users continue to report intrusive advertisements embedded directly within the interface.
The root cause of both issues lies in the application's underlying architecture. Rather than being built as a lightweight, native software utility, the Windows 11 Weather app is essentially a wrapped instance of the MSN Weather web interface running on Microsoft's WebView2 framework. Because WebView2 spawns a full Chromium-based browser engine process in the background, memory overhead inflates rapidly while web advertising scripts load alongside weather forecasts.
This discovery highlights ongoing friction in Microsoft's software strategy. Back in March 2026, Microsoft publicly committed to a major Windows 11 quality-of-life initiative focused on system performance, specifically pledging to transition away from heavy Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in favor of optimized native Windows applications.
Why do web wrappers use so much memory? When developers build native C++/WinUI 3 applications, they use core Windows system libraries that are already loaded in memory. In contrast, every WebView2 application must initialize its own browser engine, rendering process, V8 JavaScript runtime, and cache stack. This means that simply opening a weather widget uses roughly the same amount of memory as opening a full tab in Microsoft Edge.
Because Microsoft delivered its weather application through MSN, the application treated the weather widget as web inventory, serving third-party display ads and tracking scripts. For desktop users expecting a clean OS utility, displaying ad-supported web content within a native OS surface undermines system responsiveness and user trust.
Even though Microsoft has pledged to reduce its reliance on web applications and return to native code (e.g., C++ and WinUI), core applications like weather, news, and images remain heavily dependent on web components. Whether Microsoft will replace these applications with true native versions will be a crucial test case in determining whether OS performance initiatives are truly making progress.
Source: Windows Latest

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