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Some of us still know how to write software like that. And enjoy doing it.

I made a little conference schedule app a few weeks ago for a conference I was at. I used my own rust UI toolkit, which calls in to cocoa to make use of native UI components. The resulting binary is about 500kb and it uses a couple megs of ram while running. It looks and feels like a totally native iOS app. As far as the OS is concerned, it is.

Even 500kb feels too big for what it is. I’m rewriting the core at the moment, and I think it’ll be more efficient as a result. But I’m still pretty happy with it.

Fun fact, one of the XFire cofounders won Carmack's Ferrari at a Quake Tourney:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Fong#/media/File:John_C...

I still miss Battlefield 2. There is really nothing like it today, not even close. The dynamics with squads and a commander and A+ physics and overall game balance remain unmatched for all FPS games.

Fortnite, PUBG, COD, all are disgraceful in comparison.

I remember within the last decade noting that minesweeper from the windows store took more space than a pretty damn healthy Win98SE install (with minesweeper)...

Before I built a gaming computer circa 2004 I daily drove my family's old beige box that had a 350Mhz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM and Windows 98. I remember running CDex (because ripping CDs was all the rage), Trillian, and ZDaemon all at the same time without a hiccup. What a time to be alive!

I just set up a web server for a hobby project on a $10 Dell PC that has 2GB of RAM welded to the board. After booting Debian 13 it still has 1.6GB of free RAM.

In fact, that seems a lot. Back in ~1996 I was running one of the EFnet servers on a Compaq with 8MB of RAM.

Trillian, good old days. Still remember my icq number

Think about all the performance you could have gained by instead running Trillian and Winamp on an old Thinkpad next to you with even less ram

take me back

> The thing that the task manager doesn't tell you is whether or not these are shared components. It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components, so killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space as you may hope, instead, it would require killing every user of the component, some may be core system apps.

It is the other way around, shared memory causes Task Manager to _underestimate_ memory usage. Task Manager's default views report the process private working set, no shared memory included. This means that 662MB is the _minimum_ amount of memory commit that would be released by ending the process.

> the OS can overcommit

Windows does not allow overcommit by default. It may compress or optimize memory allocations to reduce the physical working set, but the kernel will start failing memory allocations once physical + swap is exhausted regardless.

> It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components

From the screenshot in the article, this is the memory usage of the Renderer process spawned by the Weather App. I find it very unlikely that some other app (say, the Copilot app) can then piggyback on Weather Renderer process. Do you have a source for this?

> killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space

Closing the weather app on my PC does in fact kill all child processes and frees up around 1GB of committed RAM. Are you not seeing the same?

> It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it.

You say tomato we say tomahto

At the end of the day bloated app is a bloated app its consequences are the same.

> the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components

Fine, shutdown the weather and stock ticker apps.

"Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM"

What a wonderful world we have created where the fix for a 1GB RAM guzzler reduces it to a mere 130MB.

Now I could start off with my old ZX80 or even my C64 (which is doing fine, thanks, and sports a USB "drive" next to its Quickshot II) but I think my first 80486 is a realistic comparison.

That ran at 25MHz, had a maths co-pro in it had 4MB RAM, a 20MB IDE HDD and I think the Orchid graphics card had 0.5MB RAM. The monitor was of course a 14" CRT VGA. OK so late 1980s!

However, that thing could run Win 3.1 and Word 2 and I think I managed to wedge a dodgy copy of Quark Express on it. I could play F117 and other games on it.

Oh well, lets see what this Linux box has on it:

/usr/bin/inxi - 1.4MB

    $ inxi -w Yeovil,UK
    Weather:
      Report: temperature: 16.05 C (61 F) conditions: scattered clouds
      Locale: Yeovil, UK current time: Mon 10 Aug 2026 01:16:05 BST
        Source: OpenWeatherMap.org

1. install ublock origin on Firefox.

not even being annoying, edge is removing manifest v2 very soon, breaking proper ad blocks just like chrome

> According to Windows Latest, the high memory consumption is due to the fact that Weather is not a fully native Windows application. Instead, it is essentially an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework.

I wonder how this approach is having such an high reduction in memory usage compared to what’s stated in the article. I would assume both use the exact same WebView here.

The only explanation here that I can think of would be that the “Add an application” starts it under an existing Edge process which shares it’s memory instead of completely isolated.

Reminder that all Chromium browsers are hostile to adblockers and are actively removing them.

Use Firefox with uBlock Origin, do not use Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc.

The weather app isn't a native app either:

> According to Windows Latest, the high memory consumption is due to the fact that Weather is not a fully native Windows application. Instead, it is essentially an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework. Task Manager shows multiple Chromium-based subprocesses running simultaneously, which contributes to the unusually high RAM usage.

If you have Edge or Chrome open (or anything else that similarly uses Chromium) then the incremental increase in RAM usage from the Weather app is likely much smaller than the headline 1GB.

> Easy workaround for this

Wipe Windows from your machine. Use Arch Linux. Problem solved.

waiting for a quick simple straight forward tool on github that takes care of this... Anyone?

A better workaround is to install Linux. My entire operating system, which includes Niri window manager and Dank Linux running a weather app, among many other things takes less around 1 gig of ram.

There's a bunch of other requirements you need to meet and no one cares about RAM consumption. So you do it the most time efficient way, not the most memory efficient.

Before you scorn, doing it the opposite way, taking more to use less memory, makes you less promotable, not more.

Just the absolute laziest implementation

Here is an example of one built using Real Basic on Mac Os system 7+. Probably uses less than 1MB.

https://tinkerdifferent.com/threads/snazzy-weather-a-snazzie...

The thing with ram is that once you can fit everything you want into the space you have available there is little benefit in optimizing further or getting more space. 1gig -> 230MB may be a large enough reduction that it goes from "too big" to "small enough".

Which is what OSes implemented in system languages with automatic memory management usually do, it is an OS service.

Oberon example,

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/Sources/Kerne...

Active Oberon example,

https://github.com/btreut/a2/blob/master/source/GarbageColle...

Bare metal Java, Go, .NET, Erlang, OCaml,... with bare metal deployments naturally have the runtime take the OS role.

This is far from trivial. Consider the WasmGC proposal, which had a somewhat similar goal.

Then C# came and said "we can't use it, we have different needs". So did Go.

The ram usage in this case is an order of magnitude lower if you install ublock in edge, as other comments have noted. Why would a system level GC affect wasteful adtech?

Any marginal efficiency gains will be wiped out with more adslop. Nathan's law.

> A major part of why these sort of simple applications are taking gbs of memory is because the GC wants to simply grow as much as it can to avoid pauses/jank. There might be 10% of the memory which is actually live in that 1gb. But because it allocates fast enough, the extra headroom is needed.

There’s very minimal state for a weather app. You should be able to sweep the whole thing pretty fast. You could probably statically allocate most of that state.

Pictures and frame buffers. If you're running fullscreen at 4k, you're probably gonna take two roughly 3840x2160x3 byte frame buffers for the window. Your designers want a background image which moves as you scroll in some parallax style; that's over 3840x2160x3 bytes more for the pixel buffer backing the image layer. And let's say roughly 50% of your screen is text with subpixel (aka full color) anti aliasing; that means another 3840x2160x3x0.5 bytes for the pre rendered text.

3840x2160x3x3.5. That's 87MB, in pixel data only. And it's a very minimal example; for the parallax image, you're gonna want the image to be significantly taller than the window; you're gonna want a ton of smaller (tho still high DPI) images for icons; a few different font atlases for different font faces you've loaded at once; maybe pre rendered pixel buffers for all sorts of UI components; etc.

And lord help you if your designers want any part of this to be animated.

(I'm playing a bit fast and loose with what lives on the GPU and what lives on the CPU here. On many systems, they share a memory pool anyway. But on systems with discrete GPUs, most of this is gonna be video memory. Though applications may wanna store CPU-side copies as well for various reasons.)

A lot of these applications run in Electron or similar libraries where a whole new browser instance, with all its overhead, is stood up for each application. The simplest answer is we need to stop trying to use web technologies as a one-size-fits-all GUI toolkit.

> This took me down a rabbit whole.

The rabbit was too hungry to even stop to chew you?

The visual assets alone will be tens of megabytes.

It can, but you have to know what you’re doing and you have to know it very well.

Looking at the opposite extreme, the guy that originally wrote the windows task manager (the thing that popped put when you pressed ctrl+alt+canc) posted a video about cloning the windows basic text editor in a 3kb binary: https://youtu.be/OG91c7xsNMc

Needless to say, the guy knows what he’s doing.

Microsoft absolutely doesn't need it, but I'm guessing the weather app team (or the core filler apps team or whatever team is responsible for it) needs it to juice a metric to make some middle manager happy.

And it makes the middle manager happy because it lets that middle manager report better numbers to their superiors again.

Etc.

It's why all large dysfunctional organisations do self destructive stuff like this.

> What’s next? Ads on the start menu?

They already exist: https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-start-menu-ads-how-to-t...

Yeah it is actually really sad when a company the size of MS still bows down to the great god Advertising!

Avert ye eyes for there are no morals in these bad lands of Redmond!

They do. Never forget, Microsoft's goal is to squeeze as much money from you as possible.

It’s an equivalent app to make a comparison with, one from an OS company.

But yeah, I still remember when a weather app would take 10 MB and I was complaining (1999)

My entire kde "plasmashell" which includes my wallpaper and the various widgets installed (including a weather widget) uses 560MB for a screen with 5120x1440 pixels.

Thank you. And it is a shame I had to scroll down this far in the comments for someone to point out the obvious. Even a weather app that uses "only" 250MB of RAM should never have been delivered by a semi professional software shop - 250MB is enough to store whatever they can display in full screen on a 5k display as a bitmap - 5 times.

I built a weather app for myself fetching ECMWF ensemble forecasts for my home location. Running the service is 60mb plus data 39mb and another 2mb for the spaghetti charts showing temperature, clouds, precip, wind over 10 days. What do I need to do to fill the other 900mb?

The article now says for me "By comparison, Apple's native Weather app on macOS uses roughly five times less memory under similar conditions."... which is not exactly the same wording.

Edit: I see the "250MB" line later in the article. This article is itself bloated for repeating nearly the same thing again.

https://github.com/dglent/meteo-qt

It is using 122.7 MB at present.

The most lightweight solution I can think of is:

   curl wttr.in

In a parallel universe Microsoft would have never killed Windows phone and they would have been forced to keep these apps a little more memory/performance friendly.

Well, this is Microsoft and Windows; it would be weird if it got better.

I’ve used Wego [0] for roughly a decade. It’s been good enough for me.

Six years in, I had to edit the configuration file once (to switch weather backends because the default backend shut down). In January, it’ll be 10 years.

[0]: https://github.com/schachmat/wego

They can, but they won’t. Microsoft is run by the most cutthroat sycophants you could possibly imagine. That money you mentioned is going to those aforementioned sycophants and shareholders.

But will the earn more money by offering a better weather app?

No, because you have to manage communication between different teams on "how" and "what" about the single browser, much easier to let every team do their "best" without any external interference

The author doesn't need to know the difference because the task manager is accurate by default. I can still offer you some reassurance:

- The Windows task manager's memory column is the private working set which is the actual memory used by the application minus shared memory (but only shared memory that is currently shared with other processes, not merely marked shared. I.E. it's similar to RES - SHR on Linux but it's more accurate)

- Windows doesn't overcommit memory. Memory that is reserved but unused (not touching all pages) by the app is truly wasted. I mention this because in your other comment you make it clear that you think this is happening. But Windows isn't Linux.

That still isn't a good look.

This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes.

Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.

What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive.

My favorite '90s weather app was WetSock. The installer was 1.5MB, though I don't recall the RAM usage. It showed a sunny/cloudy/etc. icon in the system tray, with the temperature in a tooltip:

https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...

I am pretty sure xfce4 weather plugin takes a lot less.

You don't need anything more than https://wttr.in/ even with all the fancy terminal graphics.

Well it's comparing it to apple's weather app, which is a fair comparison I suppose. 100mb still sounds like at least an order of magnitude too high to me though.

Because Jamie Zawinski was right and also wrong. Everything evolves into a browser, which, yes, can also read email.

My country's agency for weather and water mgmt has consistently the best 48h forecast. Try looking for an equivalent in yours.

That doesn't take away at all from the complete absurdity of this level of bloat. How is it not 450kB? Fine, a few high res icons and multi language support, let's make it 4MB, because to do it in 1 would take skilled coders.

They could ask AI to refactor and debloat, since they can't be bothered with it because the incentives don't seem to align.

Last decade has been the worst, not even worth it for the eye candy like before.

Most of the RAM being "used" is available to be reallocated to something more important, should the need arise.

Super interesting; it's been exactly the opposite in my experience. MacOS/iOS users put up with whatever Apple is telling them they should love - Liquid Glass, right? App Store restrictions, right? Lousy AI, right? - whether it's true or not. Linux users are willing to put up with any amount of work - i.e. bullshit - to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago.

As for Windows, I like living in cities. If you live in a city long enough - at least through a couple of major macroeconomic cycles - you'll see it improve in some ways and some neighborhoods, get worse in some ways and some neighborhoods, then improve again, etc. Cycles. Windows found itself in a downturn the last few years, primarily due to the org structure that took Windows shell away from people who could really look after it, and, yes some of those execs have earned my permanent scorn, like a bad local politician would. Now there's a focused team making that neighborhood better. I'm here for the whole ride.

I'll use Linux on computers I don't have to log into very much, so I don't have that UX problem (case-sensitive command lines? Seriously? The 1970's called...). I'll never move to MacOS City; it's like wanting to live in The Villages. Manicured lawns with no soul.

So I live in Windows Town, it's not perfect, no city is, but it's always changing, always moving, going through ups and downs, and now it has a new "city council" that's making changes for the better. And I'm expert enough to make it great for me, and avoid the "neighborhoods" that suck.

This article highlights a problem that Windows has right now, and one which I agree with, which is shipping web apps instead of native. For now, I have a workaround for it:

1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge. 2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather. 3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar so I have a Start Menu icon for the page. 4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon.

Now I have the same weather site, no ads, running in about 130MB of RAM.

Enjoy your choice of operating system. Live where you want. Sometimes your city has problems. Move if you want, but don't think you've permanently solved your UX issues if you do, you've just swapped them for different ones.

It's called a "monopoly."

As always, Captain Obvious is quick to respond.

i mean webKit never handle viewport well when compare to firefox or chrome. it's willing to materialize a 10000*10000 texture when firefox and chrome will think that is too dumb and only load the visible part. It's not a good target if you want to compare windows and mac software quality.

But it's literally not cheaper than it was ~15 years ago? Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...

We had modern programming toolkits that traded some efficiency for ease of use 20 years ago, along with GPU compositing for maximum smoothness. And that's when Vista came out requiring a whole 1GB to run properly. And other than doubling for 64GB that didn't change through 7, 8, 8.1, 10.

Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for several little things at once it turns from annoying waste into massive waste.

15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant.

Today 8GB is bare minimum.

But we went from 1080p monitors to 5k monitors and so we are pushing 7x the number of pixels and at roughly twice the bits per pixel.

You are destroying the subtle mechanism of corporate enrichment.

It is literally the MSN Weather website packaged as a WebView2 app.

I don’t know if this is sarcastic. A lot of bloat in GUI apps is because they are built as websites with a bloated front end, dependencies, custom fonts plus the binary compiled code and the decompressed images cached by the browser.

Is it not?

> Instead, it is essentially an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework. Task Manager shows multiple Chromium-based subprocesses running simultaneously, which contributes to the unusually high RAM usage.