The article reports that Windows 11’s Weather app can use roughly 1 GB of RAM and traces that to Microsoft shipping it as an MSN Weather web app inside WebView2 rather than as a native Windows app. That lands as exactly the kind of thing people fear from modern desktop software. The app is not doing novel computation. It is fetching forecast data, rendering a map, and showing ads and a content feed. The strongest throughline is that this is less about weather and more about what happens when every simple utility becomes a standalone browser surface.
A lot of people sharpened the point by separating two questions that get blurred together. First, is the app bloated in practice. Yes. Even commenters who challenged the exact 1 GB number still measured hundreds of megabytes on stock systems and called that indefensible for a weather app. Second, is the headline an exact statement of reclaimable RAM. Not necessarily. Windows Task Manager reports
private working set by default, shared libraries and commit accounting complicate comparisons, and the incremental cost may be lower if Edge or other
Chromium components are already loaded. That did not rescue Microsoft. It just changed the accusation from “this one widget alone burns 1 GB” to “Microsoft chose an architecture that makes a trivial app inherit browser-scale overhead.”
The clearest practical workaround was to skip the inbox app entirely and install the MSN Weather page as an Edge app with
uBlock Origin, which some measured at about 130 MB and without the built-in ads. That workaround also exposed the core design failure. Microsoft’s own web page, running in a browser the user already has open, can be dramatically lighter and more controllable than the official app wrapper. Several commenters contrasted this with older native Windows versions, lightweight Linux weather widgets, terminal tools like wttr.in, and small hobby projects that provide forecasts in a tiny footprint. The conclusion was blunt. Modern display stacks, higher resolution assets, and compositing do justify some growth over 1990s software, but they do not justify browser-per-widget economics. The real driver here is organizational convenience and monetization. Web tech lets teams ship faster, share code with the website, inject feeds and ads easily, and push the cost onto user hardware.
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