I was flummoxed to read a report on how much memory Microsoft’s Weather app uses on Windows 11 – more than 1GB just to render what is, ostensibly, a fancy table of stats.

Less surprising is that the GNOME Weather app does the same job for under a fifth of the reported Windows figure, while Mousam, my go-to weather app, uses around a third of Microsoft’s effort (and with a nicer design, too).

Not everyone on Windows 11 is seeing memory usage as high as the 1.1GB figure in the report by Windows Latest, but on my low-power Chuwi laptop the app used north of 900MB – bafflingly high given there are complex apps that do more with less.

What makes it so inefficient?

Microsoft builds many of its own apps using the WebView2 framework, rather than the native WinUI. This is powered by Microsoft Edge’s Chromium engine (as do the taskbar news-and-weather panels, similarly admonished for gorging on RAM).

The desktop Weather app also packs in sponsored content and ads, following Microsoft’s standard ‘billboard-first, functionality-second’ approach to design.

Windows gaming rigs won’t notice a dent in system responsiveness, but on devices with modest amounts of memory, opening Weather can cause memory pressure increases (RAM gets compressed first, then the page file gets pulled in) that lead to a sluggish system.

To Linux users, hearing how badly Windows software runs is always succour to confirmation bias, but it’s a reminder that we shouldn’t take Linux’s relative efficiencies for granted, either.

How do Linux weather apps compare?

Baffled by the reported stat, I was curious how Linux weather apps compare – desktop rather than panel applets, though the latter is how most people interested in weather forecasts prefer to get data. I opened some and checked their memory usage in Resources and Mission Center.

This was NOT a scientific test. Consider it apropos of curiosity rather than empirical data. Microsoft’s weather app is Windows-only; different OSes manage memory differently; each of the test apps has different feature sets; and so on.

Now, my laptop’s specs aren’t top-of-the-range: a low-power Intel m3-8100y processor, 8GB RAM and a 250GB NVMe SSD. But the RAM is important. It’s the only device I have that runs Windows 11, so it was a good testbed for a comparison:

AppOperating SystemMemory Usage (MiB)
Microsoft WeatherWindows 11900 MB
MousamUbuntu 26.04 LTS290 MB
GNOME WeatherUbuntu 26.04 LTS160 MB
Typhoon1Ubuntu 26.04 LTS240 MB
(Apple) WeathermacOS 13.7.8 (Intel)290 MB
(Apple) WeathermacOS 26 (ARM)250 MB

Memory figure is the average of 3 runs during active use. Microsoft’s Weather app fluctuates heavily in memory usage (across 9 subprocesses) depending on what’s being loaded, from where, whether it’s in focus, and so on.

My findings won’t shock you, I’m sure.

I didn’t hit the same 1.1GB high the Windows Latest report saw, but it came close – using a quarter of Microsoft’s own stated minimum RAM requirement for Windows 11 (supposedly just 4GB – “Yeah right!” – the world.)

But the figures do tell us what we knew: Microsoft’s own software sucks – figuratively and computationally. Utility isn’t the point; it’d rather ship a browser tab with ads bolted on to pad its own pocket than build an optimised app that respects users and their hardware.

Used a different weather app or seen different numbers on Windows? Share your own memory readings below.

  1. Typhoon is cross-platform app written in Qt, On Linux, Resources reported it used <4 MB, but a Python process belonging to it uses around 250MB. Mission Center reports this figure together. ↩︎
  2. For macOS I (obviously) had to glean values using Apple devices. I took a Weather app reading from an Intel i5-based 2017 iMac 4k with 32GB RAM, and a reading from a mate’s MacBook Pro with M4 Max and (enviable) 64GB RAM running macOS 26. ↩︎