The default Windows 11 Weather app, installed on millions of users' taskbars, has come under scrutiny following independent testing that revealed it consumes over 1.2GB of RAM just to display basic weather and map information This article explores processes release memory. . The findings, initially reported by Windows Latest and later confirmed by Wccftech and Notebookcheck, highlight an unsettling irony: Microsoft has been boasting about improved memory efficiency for Windows 11, especially on systems with 8GB of RAM, yet one of its own bundled apps is secretly working against that goal.
When testers expanded the app’s process tree in Task Manager, they discovered nine separate Chromium-based sub-processes running simultaneously behind what should be a lightweight utility, leading to unexpected memory usage and performance issues.
Reports suggest the company is now planning low-memory optimizations for the Weather app, potentially moving it away from its current WebView2-based architecture toward a more native implementation by late 2026. Until that arrives, some outlets caution that the "nine processes" figure alone should not be mistaken for a memory leak, as Chromium-based apps commonly split rendering, GPU, and network tasks across multiple processes that release memory once the app is closed. Until Microsoft ships a genuinely native replacement, the built-in Weather app remains a small but telling example of how legacy web-wrapper design choices can undercut an operating system's own performance goals.
