Testing published on 9 August 2026 found Windows 11's bundled Weather app holding more than 1 GB of RAM in normal use and peaking near 1.6 GB. macOS Weather does the same job in roughly 250 MB. The cause is architectural: it is an MSN web app running on WebView2, with Chromium subprocesses to match.
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Windows eleven's built in Weather app holds more than a gigabyte of RAM, and spikes to about one point six while you use it. The Mac does the same job in roughly two hundred and fifty megabytes. On an eight gigabyte laptop, that is a fifth of your memory, for a forecast. And it is not a bug. The app is an MSN web page wrapped in WebView2, which is Chromium. So it does not run as one process. You get a browser process, a GPU process, a network service, renderers, each with its own heap. You are not running a weather app. You are running a small browser that only ever loads one site, and the ads inside it are live web content too. There is a floor here that no tuning removes. Ship a second rendering engine inside your app and you pay for it. Somebody decided one codebase for web, desktop and widgets was worth that, and the memory bill went to whoever bought the cheap laptop.