I flummoxed to read a report about how much memory Microsoft’s Weather app uses on Windows 11 – more than 1GB just to render what is, ostensibly, a fancy table of stats.

I was less flummoxed to check the memory usage of Mousam, my current go-to weather app on Linux. It the same job for under a third of the Windows figure and, in my opinion, has a much nicer design too.

Not everyone running Windows 11 will spot memory usage as high as that reported by Windows Latest, but on my low-power Chuwi laptop (the same one I checked Mousam on Ubuntu) it was north of 900MB.

It’s not an apples-to-apple comparison of course.

Microsoft builds many of its own apps using the WebView2 framework, which is powered by Microsoft Edge’s Chromium engine. That tech also powers Windows’ Widgets – taskbar news-and-weather panels – are similarly admonished for gorging on RAM.

With weather, there’s also sponsored content and ads – courtesy of Microsoft’s usual ‘billboard-first, functionality-second’ design approach. Perhaps a rare example where opting for Electron might have been more efficient.

Windows gaming rigs won’t notice a dent in system responsiveness, but on devices with modest amounts of memory, opening Weather can cause memory pressure increases (RAM gets compressed first, then the page file gets pulled in) that lead to a sluggish system.

How do Linux weather apps compare?

I was curious how Linux weather apps compared – desktop ones, not panel applets (which are what most people interested in weather forecasts will use) – so I had I ran a couple and checked their memory usage in Resources and Mission Center.

Now, my laptop’s specs aren’t top-of-the-range: a low-power Intel m3-8100y processor, 8GB RAM and a 250GB NVMe SSD. But the RAM is important. It’s the only device I have that runs Windows 11, so was a good test for a comparison:

| App | Operating System | Memory Usage (MiB) |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Weather | Windows 11 | 900 MB |
| Mousam | Ubuntu 26.04 LTS | 290 MB |
| GNOME Weather | Ubuntu 26.04 LTS | 160 MB |
| Typhoon 1 | Ubuntu 26.04 LTS | 240 MB |
| (Apple) Weather | macOS 13.7.8 (Intel) 2 | 90 MB |
| (Apple) Weather | macOS 26 (ARM) | 250 MB |

Memory figure is the average of 3 runs during active use. Microsoft’s Weather app fluctuates in memory usages (across 9-subprocesses) depending on what’s being loaded, whether it’s in focus, and so on.

I didn’t hit the same 1.1GB high the Windows Latest report saw, but it came close. The weather app uses around a quarter of Microsoft’s own stated minimum RAM requirement for Windows 11, which is supposedly just 4GB (“Yeah right!” — the world.)

Do these findings stop the press? No. Are they the “feel good” stats that act as confirmation bias to make decisions to swerve Microsoft feel better? Sure.

But they telling us what we all know: Microsoft’s own software sucks – here, figuratively and computationally – because the company doesn’t care about building quality software.

Use a different weather app or seen different numbers on Windows? share your own memory readings below.

• Typhoonis cross-platform app written in Qt, On Linux,- Resourcesreported it used <4 MB, but a Python process belonging to it uses around 250MB.- Mission Centerreports this figure together. ↩︎
• For macOS I (obviously) had to glean values using Apple devices. I took a Weatherapp reading from an Intel i5-based 2017 iMac 4k with 32GB RAM, and a reading from a mate’s MacBook Pro with M4 Max and (enviable) 64GB RAM running macOS 26. ↩︎