Summary
- Windows 11 Weather app hogs about 1.2GB RAM and spawns multiple Chromium processes.
- App displays ads because it wraps MSN weather in a WebView2/browser shell.
- Native macOS Weather uses ~247MB with no ads; Microsoft should port to WinUI 3.
Summary
- Windows 11 Weather app hogs about 1.2GB RAM and spawns multiple Chromium processes.
- App displays ads because it wraps MSN weather in a WebView2/browser shell.
- Native macOS Weather uses ~247MB with no ads; Microsoft should port to WinUI 3.
Even 247MB seems too much for usually checking the weather. Once upon a time, the entire operating system was able to run without any problems on less than 512MB of RAM, including programs, and now you tell me that I need half of it to check the weather? Technology has lost itself along the way…
I’d bet most of that would be images, the little animations it makes, all the different maps and overlays it needs, the ability to support multiple devices.
You could argue some optimization would benefit it, but at 247MB with an OS that is good at managing memory, I really don’t see how much smaller you could get it to.
Framework upon framework, abstraction upon abstraction. In pursuit of consistency and ease of development, the art of computer programming was lost and replaced with careless consumption of resources.
When I was young and A.I. was a science fiction topic, I was convinced that increasing efficiency in code and design would be a major benefit, doing more with less, the everyday magic of software disappearing into the walls and devices like magic gnomes.
I forgot about the ads.
Yeah.
Weather.gov has an API. Hit three endpoints- one to convert lat/long to their grid system, one for current conditions, one for forecast. Box the JSON into a pretty layout. <100 lines of TCL/Tk if you want to do it the lazy way and it still takes less RAM than an Electron Hello World.
It depends how far back you go. I remember upgrading from 4MB RAM to 8MB to run Win95.
You can absolutely get the job of displaying weather done on a meg or two.