The built-in forecast tool on Windows 11 is consuming over 1.2GB of RAM while sitting idle, roughly five times what Apple’s native Weather app uses on macOS. Beyond the memory footprint, the app continues to serve sponsored content inside a system utility that ships with every Windows license. If you are checking the Windows 11 Weather app RAM usage out of curiosity, the numbers tell a clear story about how Microsoft prioritizes its inbox suite.
The Windows 11 Weather app RAM problem explained
Open Task Manager with the app running in the background, and you will see memory consumption climb past 1.2GB. Expand the process tree, and the architecture becomes obvious: nine separate Chromium-based sub-processes are running under the Weather parent process. Microsoft has long relied on WebView2 to render the interface, meaning every time you open the forecast, you are essentially spinning up a dedicated browser instance. By comparison, Apple’s Weather app on macOS sits at 246.7MB of memory as a single native process. The gap is not a difference in feature parity. It is a fundamental difference in how the code is delivered to your hardware.
Why the app is actually MSN Weather
Searching for the default forecast tool in the Microsoft Store reveals its actual identity: MSN Weather. The app pulls data from licensed providers including Foreca, the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts, and regional services worldwide. The forecast data itself is solid. Live radar overlays, hourly precipitation breakdowns, air quality index readings, moon phase tracking, and severe weather alerts from the National Weather Service all function as expected. But the delivery mechanism remains a web wrapper. Microsoft has been actively replacing legacy WebView2 shells with native code across Windows 11 this year. Eight inbox apps recently received full native overhauls, covering Calculator, Camera, Clock, Media Player, Paint, Photos, and Sound Recorder. Weather is conspicuously absent from that list.
Sponsored tiles inside a forecast grid
Scroll through the forecast and you will find sponsored tiles dressed to look like weather cards. An Adobe Acrobat promotion for AI document chat sits right alongside temperature and wind data, using nearly identical styling. The Microsoft Store listing for the app also nudges users to sign in with a Microsoft account, despite the fact that the core forecast data requires no authentication. Apple manages to deliver the same granular weather data on macOS without a single ad, and while Microsoft does not enjoy Apple’s hardware profit margins, that does not excuse serving sponsored content in a system utility. Users who already paid for Windows should not have to navigate banner ads just to check the sky.
What this means for your daily workflow
If you are running Windows 11 on a machine with 8GB or 16GB of RAM, background memory hogs directly impact how many tabs, utilities, and services you can keep open without slowdowns. A single forecast app claiming over 1.2GB at idle is a poor trade-off for a feature most users check once a day. The sponsored content also degrades the experience, turning a quick glance at the sky into a promotional gallery. For IT administrators managing a fleet, the memory footprint adds up quickly across hundreds of endpoints, and the forced sign-in prompt creates friction during standard deployment workflows. You can verify the memory usage yourself by opening Task Manager, expanding the process tree under Weather, and noting the Chromium sub-processes.
How Microsoft can fix it
The path forward is already mapped out. Microsoft publicly committed in March to building fully native Windows apps, with Rudy Huyn, who leads native app development at the company, stating the goal extends across the inbox suite. The company is also actively dumping legacy Win32 and WebView2 code in favor of WinUI 3, which was designed specifically to reduce memory overhead and improve rendering efficiency. A native, ad-free Weather app rebuilt on WinUI would serve as a perfect proof of concept for third-party developers still treating Windows as a secondary platform for web wrappers. Until then, the forecast will keep running on borrowed time and borrowed memory.
Source: Windows Latest
Over to you: Would you prefer a native, ad-free Weather app even if it means fewer built-in features for the first release?
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