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…
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.
I use windows to check the weather and it uses 0MB RAM.
Ads In a weather app, because of course
ColotOS (android for oppo phones) just added adverts to their file browser!
My first thought: If it isn’t always running it honestly not a major concern how much memory the weather app uses.
My second thought: 1.2GB WTF? Ok, that is way over the top. The executive in charge should be fired.
My third thought: 250MB? That is still a little unnecessary, even if it probably does fall under the “doesn’t matter” threshold.
My fourth thought:
gnome-weatheruses 180MB, not great, not bad.I think reading how much RAM a program uses is a bit complicated. In example there are shared libraries, and RAM will be reused if multiple applications uses the same resource. If two programs using the same library uses up 1.2gb on their own, then starting up app A and measure its 1.2gb, then close and measure app B with 1.2gb would give you exactly that. But in reality if both apps would run at the same time, their total RAM usage might be just 1.4gb.
As an example, if I already run KDE on my system and another KDE app starts up, it might not use too much more RAM. But the same app on a GNOME system might require a lot of additional RAM. So the Windows 11 Weather app might not even use 1.2gb on its own. No idea how they measured it.
and nobody stopped to ask if we needed a weather app on our desktops.
I manually installed gnome-weather on mine. It doesn’t have to be part of the main install but should be available for those that want it.
Imagine paying for an OS and then get served ads. That shit should be illegal.
Almost 300mb to show the weather? Apple should be ashamed.
300mb is what apps on Android used to take up back when 4GB RAM was standard. Macs have shipped with 8GB on base model for many years. This is not an issue, sorry
Relative size it’s ok. Absolute it’s still way too much for what the app is doing.
Have you used the app in question? There’s animated hi res backgrounds that have to be loaded for diff locations, a live map, tons of detailed widgets and animations… 300MB seems reasonable to me. You might not want any of these things on a weather app, hence there are many to choose from out there ;)
I am sure that it is reasonable to make the app this big. But timid still big because app size was just not a priority. There was a time when apple cared about that too and they don’t anymore. That I am lamenting. Yeah, I‘l go back in my grumpy old man corner.
80% of windows users, I guarantee, use the weather app daily. I place my bets there’s a bunch of crap happening as a background process.
I got 99 problems and microsoft is all of them, except one.
Most weather apps are just data collection.
what would microslop be without the slop?
Don’t all webview2 apps share resources? The real problem is webview2 (based on chromium?) is bloated.
