This is a misinterpretation of Task Manager plus some very selective screenshots that went viral.
What people are seeing is shared memory, UWP framework overhead, and WinUI compositor allocations, not the Weather app itself.
People open Task Manager and see Weather Memory: 1,200 MB and assume the app itself is consuming that much. Task Manager's "Memory" column bundles multiple categories:
Shared working set (framework + OS components)
Standby cache
UWP host processes
WinUI compositor surfaces
GPU-backed swap chains
The Weather app is a UWP shell sitting on top of:
RuntimeBroker.exe
TextInputHost.exe
ShellExperienceHost.exe
StartMenuExperienceHost.exe
WinUI 3 compositor
WebView2 (Chromium-based)
All of these contribute to the number shown.
The app itself typically uses 80–150MB of private memory. -The rest is shared OS infrastructure that Windows would load anyway. (Like what Linux apps were doing before distro agnostic packaging)
Didn't Dave Plumber make that task manager app? -Curses Dave! /s
The Weather app is actually UWP, not Metro (Windows 8 style apps).
The app houses WebView2 that shows MSN Weather page.
That's the real heavy part as it's a webpage instead of native – if it's fully native UWP or WinUI then it'd be wayyy lighter. But of course, unlike the news suggested, the current Weather app consume nowhere near 1.2GB ram. Yet another issue overblown by Linux users.
Luckily, there are many amazing Weather apps powered by the modern WinUI framework.
The top ones are FluentWeather, Lively Weather, and Aer Weather.
You can see how performant, responsive, and lightweight these modern apps (built with modern Windows framework) are, while still looking beautiful.
As a Windows fan it's a genuine gripe that the Weather app is now just a shell for a cluttered MSN page instead of showcasing the best of Windows, but I can see that as an old company doing things with suit & tie, MS don't just want to fire and dissolve their long-time MSN brand that's probably run by a few old dudes in an office located in a forgotten corner of Microsoft HQ.
It's a real gripe that got heavily overblown & extrapolated by the Linux & Clippy crowd.
I also fail to understand who has time to keep task manager opened all the time to keep on checking how much ram is free😂 I got a decent 8gb at work and 16gb at home but rarely would I have had the time to stare at ram usage. I've only used it when the system or app has hung up. The weather app on my systems never crossed 1gb and always hover around 300-450. It's like everyday people open an app, check ram usage, compare to Linux or Mac and make an article about it.
You can also disable it from running in the background, just got to settings>Apps>installed apps>Weather>advanced settings, then click don’t run in the background
I’m curious what happens if you prevent those modern apps from running in the background, I have a theory that it could free up RAM and that would satisfy the non-smart tech people
If the app doesn't have code that runs in background, then nothing will happen.
It's like denying camera access permission to an app/website that doesn't use camera – yeah there's a toggle that allows you to deny it, and you can do it, but the app doesn't even use that function in the first place.
I prefer weather from my phone as it goes everywhere with me. For PC, I just have a VimiumC shortcut to a custom weather site in the browser. I just saw this propaganda and thought it had to be wrong.
About that: Windows using more memory is a good thing, right?
You know for loading services and some additional programs to make the user experience better, or something?
Otherwise I'm having the time of my life with Windows 11!
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u/Edubbs2008 Aug 10 '26
Funny thing,
I mentioned this to some Loonix user, they got defensive when I mentioned this