| ▲ | Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM(notebookcheck.net) |
| 150 points by akyuu 4 hours ago | 127 comments |
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| ▲ | SBArbeit 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| Easy workaround for this: 1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge. 2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather. 3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar to get a Start Menu icon for the page. 4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon. Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM, with no ads. It's not as nice as a native app, of course, but it's 1000% better than the useless ads and MSN feed that you can't block from the built-in Weather icon. (Also, go into Widget settings and turn off "Discover / Microsoft Start feed". Same crap, different surface. Get rid of it.) |
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| ▲ | aniceperson 12 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 1. install ublock origin on Firefox. not even being annoying, edge is removing manifest v2 very soon, breaking proper ad blocks just like chrome | | |
| ▲ | rstat1 a minute ago | parent [-] | | I don't know if I'd say that's gonna break "proper ad blocks". UBO Lite (the MV3 version of UBO) seems to work just fine in my experience, at the core function of being an ad blocker, |
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| ▲ | eviks 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > By comparison, Apple's native Weather app on macOS reportedly uses less than 250 MB of RAM That's also bloated, couldn't they find a better comparison to illustrate the egregious waste? |
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| ▲ | nashashmi 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s an equivalent app to make a comparison with, one from an OS company. But yeah, I still remember when a weather app would take 10 MB and I was complaining (1999) | | |
| ▲ | glimshe 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 10MB to tell me the weather from a remote server... Let's remember that the sprawling world of Legend of Zelda SNES (a Link to the Past), including all graphics, music, code and dialogue was 1MB. | |
| ▲ | blackhaz an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | 10 MB is ridiculously overbloated. 1 MB or something in that vicinity should be more like it. | | |
| ▲ | Const-me an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | 10 MB is not too bad for a GUI app. If the app is full screen, display is FullHD and has 8 bit depth, that's almost 8 MB memory for the back buffer alone. Enable HDR and pixels become 8 bytes RGBA16_Float instead of 4 bytes BGRA8_Unorm, twice as much memory. | | |
| ▲ | anabab 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 2 bit 160x144px ought to be enough for anything | |
| ▲ | perching_aix 31 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is only relevant if we assume CPU rendering. The article described system RAM use, not video RAM use. Task Manager doesn't combine the two. They clearly spent it on maintaining their independent Chromium instance instead. |
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| ▲ | david-gpu an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How much money are these companies going to make by reducing their weather app to 1MB, or 10MB? How much is it going to cost them to get there? The world doesn't run on personal aesthetics, when nobody is willing to pay for them. | | |
| ▲ | nashashmi an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | These days we have an AI system to do exactly this kind of optimization, too expensive for humans, and too cheap compared to consuming expensive modern hardware | |
| ▲ | fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The MacBook Neo has only 8GiB of RAM. This is widely decried as not enough. The RAMpocalypse means that 8 GiB is going to have to be enough or else it'll eat into Apple's margins. The Neos are wildly popular though because people have used it and 8 GiB is fine. So while the singular weather app being smaller itself isn't material, I'm aggregate, macOS being more efficient is something that lets Apple sell a lower spec product while still justifying a higher price. | | |
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| ▲ | cdud3 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The KDE Plasma weather app takes in maximum 1MB. | | |
| ▲ | lynguist an hour ago | parent [-] | | I'm not sure if you're reply hunting or we talk about different apps but how would you fit the Qt runtime, Javascript runtime, font cache, graphics, networking libraries, etc in this limit? This can't physically be under 70 MB, and more like 100-200+ MB. | | |
| ▲ | rpdillon 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Sibling comment called it: these are dynamic libs used by the desktop, so the incremental RAM usage is low. That's a good approach! Makes me wonder what the heck MS is doing to get their app to add an incremental gig to memory usage. | |
| ▲ | Telaneo 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Many of those things are already in memory just from running an empty desktop. |
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| ▲ | rpdillon 35 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, you're getting dumped on for this, but it seems about right? For an extreme example: curl https://wttr.in/
Inside of a conky widget would do the trick, I think.https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/wiki/Lua:-Shell-Integra... |
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| ▲ | cogman10 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My entire kde "plasmashell" which includes my wallpaper and the various widgets installed (including a weather widget) uses 560MB for a screen with 5120x1440 pixels. | | |
| ▲ | monster_truck an hour ago | parent [-] | | That's still 26x more than the size of the display buffer, I would never settle for such bloat /s |
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| ▲ | loehnsberg 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I built a weather app for myself fetching ECMWF ensemble forecasts for my home location. Running the service is 60mb plus data 39mb and another 2mb for the spaghetti charts showing temperature, clouds, precip, wind over 10 days. What do I need to do to fill the other 900mb? | | |
| ▲ | zapkyeskrill an hour ago | parent [-] | | Run those things as an electron app? Add on analytics, location tracking and data exfil and you'll be fairly close |
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| ▲ | ndriscoll 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My gaming PC that I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and Winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM. |
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| ▲ | kmfrk 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Shame, because it's genuinely a great map - ahem, optimizations aside. I remember giving the app a second chance - after assuming it to be bloatware next to all the other default apps that came with Windows - but after seeing it redeem itself in benchmarks[1], I gave it a shot and quite like it. The iOS app was too rubbish to bother with, though. I'm curious what could options there are for decent predictions. Especially with Dark Sky never having been much of an option for Europe. I see some of the people behind it have a new subscription-based iOS app to try, though: https://acmeweather.com/app. Do people have any desktop weather apps that strike a nice balance between decent code and actually useful predictions? Future weather's likely to be anything but boring, unfortunately. [1]: https://forecastwatch.com/awards/2026/ |
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| ▲ | SSLy 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | My country's agency for weather and water mgmt has consistently the best 48h forecast. Try looking for an equivalent in yours. |
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| ▲ | cogman10 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| As time goes on, I become more and more convinced that OSes need some sort of OS level GC pool which all GCed languages play in rather than having the language runtime provide the GC. A major part of why these sort of simple applications are taking gbs of memory is because the GC wants to simply grow as much as it can to avoid pauses/jank. There might be 10% of the memory which is actually live in that 1gb. But because it allocates fast enough, the extra headroom is needed. Even if it isn't the case that the GC is universal, having a shared GC amongst runtimes would be a boon in general. If I have 3 JVMs running, I might give them all 1gb of memory even though really each of them only needs 200mb to get their job done. The extra headroom is for when a burst happens. If I could combine all 3 into 1, I could save a lot of allocation overhead and general memory. This does sort of exist in java (war deployments), but there are limitations that make it unappealing. For example, each of the JVMs have to be the same version. |
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| ▲ | cromka 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I seriously wonder if the recent migrations between languages mande by major projects leveraging SOTA LLMs have started a new trend of a) making native apps more common, as opposed to Electron and stuff b) will help to optimize existing apps and remove the bloat. The alternative is, of course, that most apps will end up being bloated even more specifically because of how we'll slowly transition into developing using LLMs only. |
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| ▲ | firefoxd 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This took me down a rabbit whole. Why can a simple single purpose app not be just a couple megabytes if not less? The popular options are electron 100MB+, or embedding python3 in your executable which is at least 40MB. But if you build it natively, you should have all of Microsoft tools at your disposition, dlls and such. In theory, this should allow you to make a 1 mb app or less. But in practice, it's the worse option. |
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| ▲ | mort96 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Pictures and frame buffers. If you're running fullscreen at 4k, you're probably gonna take two roughly 3840x2160x3 byte frame buffers for the window. Your designers want a background image which moves as you scroll in some parallax style; that's over 3840x2160x3 bytes more for the pixel buffer backing the image layer. And let's say roughly 50% of your screen is text with subpixel (aka full color) anti aliasing; that means another 3840x2160x3x0.5 bytes for the pre rendered text. 3840x2160x3x3.5. That's 87MB, in pixel data only. And it's a very minimal example; for the parallax image, you're gonna want the image to be significantly taller than the window; you're gonna want a ton of smaller (tho still high DPI) images for icons; a few different font atlases for different font faces you've loaded at once; maybe pre rendered pixel buffers for all sorts of UI components; etc. And lord help you if your designers want any part of this to be animated. (I'm playing a bit fast and loose with what lives on the GPU and what lives on the CPU here. On many systems, they share a memory pool anyway. But on systems with discrete GPUs, most of this is gonna be video memory. Though applications may wanna store CPU-side copies as well for various reasons.) | | |
| ▲ | firefoxd 37 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Good point. Though 4k image assets mean more that they look in 4k, not that their size is 4k. It might not be 87mb, but still way more than the couple mb I suggested. | |
| ▲ | 201984 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Your designers want Sometimes, you need to tell the designers NO. Moving background images don't help people figure out what the weather is going to be. | | |
| ▲ | keicwifjwud 29 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | And sometimes your engineers need to be a LOT less stingy. 1GB is clearly overkill for an app such as this, but ~300MB is perfectly acceptable if it works well, looks good and does what it should do. There is such a thing as overdesign, but when you’re building a modern application, you must trust your designer’s sense of aesthetics and knowledge of UX patterns—two things engineers are often notoriously bad at. | |
| ▲ | mort96 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Honestly if the image is of the current weather it kinda does. I don't mind e.g Apple's weather app design at all |
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| ▲ | trzy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The visual assets alone will be tens of megabytes. | | |
| ▲ | anonymars 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Why, though? You need some icons and some map imagery, not 4K texture maps | | | |
| ▲ | iAMkenough 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | For a weather app, you should be able to get by with a couple base vectors you modify based on conditions. | | |
| ▲ | mort96 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | On disk yeah, sure. But you're gonna render them into a pixel buffer which lives in memory. | | |
| ▲ | samrus an hour ago | parent [-] | | How did applications do it before? Like in the 90s or 00s | | |
| ▲ | mort96 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | WAY lower resolution screens so pixel and frame buffers were a tiny fraction of the size, non-composited graphical environments which meant there was one fewer frame buffer per window, and a visual style which typically emphasized large pictures/animations less. | |
| ▲ | nicoburns an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | They had fewer graphics, and much lower resolution screens. | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Windows 98 SE kind of went overboard with the graphics (remember Active Desktop?), and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024. But if you run modern stuff at 1080p (60% more pixels) or 720p (fewer pixels), you're not going to see comparable memory use. | | |
| ▲ | mort96 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Windows 98 wasn't composited, which makes a huge difference. And to be clear, there's a ton of unnecessary bloat today as well. It's just that even a lean and mean highly hand optimized native app is gonna be way bigger today than it was then, due to compositing, higher resolution assets, higher resolution screens and different design sensibilities. But most apps aren't lean and mean highly hand optimized native apps so. | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 24 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Compositing means you can excuse an extra dozen megabytes per megapixel of window size. The window in the article is less than a megapixel. That factors in the relevant part of screen resolution too. High resolution assets should scale alongside window size too, adding a fraction of the above dozen megabytes. And I'm saying 98SE already had image-heavy design sensibilities all over. You don't have to highly hand optimize to run a weather UI in a lean way. |
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| ▲ | vel0city an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > and a common screen size at the time was 1280x1024 Maybe if you were really rich and only used high end desktops. A lot of the computers I used back then were still 800x600, fancier ones were 1024x768. If you happened to also have a 2D accelerator card you'd potentially have 1280x1024. And lots of apps purposefully ran at a much lower color depth, it was common for games to run at 8 or 16 bit color mode. | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 36 minutes ago | parent [-] | | I saw a lot of computers set to 800x600 but I don't recall any that couldn't be switched to at least 1024x768. Which is still quite close to 720p for making this comparison. And yeah lots of fullscreen things ran in lower color, but this is about desktop mode and I never saw a desktop mode that struggled based on color depth. |
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| ▲ | Micrococonut 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Should be able to get by with using system graphics | |
| ▲ | SV_BubbleTime 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do all visual aspects of a weather app need to be loaded at once? Is the cost penalty loading a hundred kilobytes per image from disk really unacceptable? | | |
| ▲ | doikor an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Even if the app is no longer using that memory it is not released until Windows thinks another app needs it. | |
| ▲ | vel0city an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | And then people complain about how unresponsive applications are, all these little stutters as things pop in. |
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| ▲ | znpy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It can, but you have to know what you’re doing and you have to know it very well. Looking at the opposite extreme, the guy that originally wrote the windows task manager (the thing that popped put when you pressed ctrl+alt+canc) posted a video about cloning the windows basic text editor in a 3kb binary: https://youtu.be/OG91c7xsNMc Needless to say, the guy knows what he’s doing. |
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| ▲ | itopaloglu83 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And it also ads on it. Really Microsoft? Do you really need all the ads revenue from the weather app? What’s next? Ads on the start menu? |
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| ▲ | mort96 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Microsoft absolutely doesn't need it, but I'm guessing the weather app team (or the core filler apps team or whatever team is responsible for it) needs it to juice a metric to make some middle manager happy. And it makes the middle manager happy because it lets that middle manager report better numbers to their superiors again. Etc. It's why all large dysfunctional organisations do self destructive stuff like this. | | |
| ▲ | SlightlyLeftPad 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | “What value are you bringing to the company?” translates to “if you’re not printing money, you lose your job.” | | |
| ▲ | dasyud an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I once worked on a project where the goal was to improve the reliability of MS Teams. The skip level manager was not happy when we said we cannot estimate what the revenue gain would be because it can't be measured. | |
| ▲ | mapontosevenths 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Any manager who doesn't push back when given a perverse incentive should be fired. They are not leaders, they are followers... And not even very good followers. | | |
| ▲ | mort96 an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yet they're the ones who get promoted because their KPIs are the best. |
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| ▲ | WakeUpPeople 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > What’s next? Ads on the start menu? They already exist: https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-start-menu-ads-how-to-t... | | |
| ▲ | _trampeltier 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Don't they even had it earlyer and even let the DNS expire, so someone else could spam the startmenu? |
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| ▲ | bossyTeacher 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They do. Never forget, Microsoft's goal is to squeeze as much money from you as possible. | | |
| ▲ | dabinat an hour ago | parent [-] | | That’s the goal of every publicly-traded corporation in a mature market. Wall Street demands ever-increasing returns and they can’t grow their customer base much so cost-cutting and fleecing existing customers are the only levers to pull. |
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| ▲ | iamcoder18 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This article seems to be underestimating how much RAM a weather app should take. A well thought-out, native Weather app wouldn't take more than 100 mb of RAM. |
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| ▲ | e2le 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive. | | |
| ▲ | kevincox 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Mostly rendering. A bunch of images, text, UI elements. On a modern high resolution display it adds up quite quickly. You can surely cut it down a bit, but 100MB isn't absurd. | | |
| ▲ | Dylan16807 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If I full-screen it in high enough resolution it can be excused for using 100MB temporarily. The window in the article wasn't very big. At most it would have about 10MB of framebuffer, and the images on display would fit into 1MB uncompressed. We can't excuse typical program waste with screen sizes. Especially when you can switch to 1080p or 720p and watch them still use massive amounts of memory. | |
| ▲ | charleslmunger 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A weather widget using 8 bit color plus alpha on a 4k display show three full size images in 100mb. But I suspect that's not the ux we're talking about here, and a widget style system has no excuse. | | |
| ▲ | galad87 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Apple's Weather app has an animated background, glassy views, and nice animations like water droplets on the glassy views when it's raining. So rendering all that on a 4k or more display at 10bit depth is going to consume a bit of RAM. However I guess it can surely be improved to make it consume less RAM. | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://wttr.in/ shows it's very possible. | |
| ▲ | anthk 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Vector icons. It can be fit under 50MBs. | | |
| ▲ | pixelesque 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Those still have to be rasterised to a pixel-based frame buffer at render/compositing time. |
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| ▲ | useasvg 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Use an svg. Or render everything using css, 100mb is someone not trying. 1gb is absurd abuse that only domestic violence victims put up with. | | |
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| ▲ | cyberrock 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think this depends on your location, because in some places you really want to view a radar map. "Rain in $CITY" is practically useless for me. Still, the (static?) map in the depicted app shouldn't take 1GB. |
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| ▲ | karmakurtisaani 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes. Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran. | | |
| ▲ | whynotmaybe 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Back in my days, I had to remove the mouse driver from autoexec so that microprose grand pirx had 600kb of ram to start | | |
| ▲ | SV_BubbleTime 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Had to get a ride to drive floppies with corrected config.sys and autoexec.bat files around to friends. Things weren’t actually worse. |
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| ▲ | kevin_thibedeau 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | When RAM was $100 per MB that would be $10,000. You can do a weather app in much less provided you use native code. | |
| ▲ | big85 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | LumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM. | | |
| ▲ | drdaeman 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | ESP32 in my OpenSprinkler pulls the weather (among a few more things it does) just fine and it has 520 kilobytes or RAM total. | | |
| ▲ | 2Gkashmiri 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Windows really I'd shitty for "assuming" unlimited ram, storage, processing, internet budget for them to get away with it. They "could" make it easy but why bother? I assume next update will make calculator 1 gb download, 2gb ram resident and ADS |
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| ▲ | keicwifjwud 22 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Back in my day Back in my day systems used to be a lot simpler too. These “back in my mind” comparisons show a clear lack of understanding of the subject matter. 1996 apps are not the same as 2026 apps. Expectations are different. Design languages are different. Even the UX is entirely different. 1GB is clearly overkill, no question. But ~100MB to ~300MB is perfectly reasonable and you know it. |
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| ▲ | p1mrx 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | My favorite '90s weather app was WetSock. The installer was 1.5MB, though I don't recall the RAM usage. It showed a sunny/cloudy/etc. icon in the system tray, with the temperature in a tooltip: https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse... https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu... | |
| ▲ | lousken 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I am pretty sure xfce4 weather plugin takes a lot less. | | | |
| ▲ | satvikpendem 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You don't need anything more than https://wttr.in/ even with all the fancy terminal graphics. | |
| ▲ | benj111 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well it's comparing it to apple's weather app, which is a fair comparison I suppose. 100mb still sounds like at least an order of magnitude too high to me though. |
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| ▲ | CrimsonCape an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yesterday I was running :
NixOS, mango window manager, 5 instances of ghostty, 2 of those running fresh terminal editor, firefox with 5 tabs and I was at 2.37gb of RAM. |
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| ▲ | alkonaut 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wonder if this is a fair calculation including the fact that multiple WebView apps should be sharing the same libraries in memory. If you pay 0.5-1GB to load the edge/chromium libraries but that memory is amortized over N different apps the user is likely to run, then the ”1GB for the weather app” is an unlikely worst case. |
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| ▲ | feverzsj 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's just msn weather page. Can't they use one single browser for all their apps instead of one per app? |
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| ▲ | whynotmaybe 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, because you have to manage communication between different teams on "how" and "what" about the single browser, much easier to let every team do their "best" without any external interference |
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| ▲ | hyperhello 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I would like to be assured that the author knows the difference between actual memory and setting aside paging space. |
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| ▲ | tredre3 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The author doesn't need to know the difference because the task manager is accurate by default. I can still offer you some reassurance: - The Windows task manager's memory column is the private working set which is the actual memory used by the application minus shared memory (but only shared memory that is currently shared with other processes, not merely marked shared. I.E. it's similar to RES - SHR on Linux but it's more accurate) - Windows doesn't overcommit memory. Memory that is reserved but unused (not touching all pages) by the app is truly wasted. I mention this because in your other comment you make it clear that you think this is happening. But Windows isn't Linux. | |
| ▲ | benj111 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That still isn't a good look. | | |
| ▲ | hyperhello an hour ago | parent [-] | | I’m not sure if you mean a good look for the process or for the author but paging space is just saying “gimme a gigabyte” like saying “gimme a plate” is at a barbecue. The resources themselves aren’t being used at that point. |
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| ▲ | w4yai 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Please, Microsoft, PLEASE ! You can do BETTER ! Stop acting like an internship for every single feature you add ! Where's the money going ? |
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| ▲ | calini 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The Weather app in Windows is more ads than weather, so it checks out. |
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| ▲ | dietr1ch 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| At some point you just got to be amazed at it and celebrate. |
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| ▲ | undebuggable 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| An app which could have been a website. |
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| ▲ | superjan 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I don’t know if this is sarcastic. A lot of bloat in GUI apps is because they are built as websites with a bloated front end, dependencies, custom fonts plus the binary compiled code and the decompressed images cached by the browser. | |
| ▲ | perching_aix 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is it not? > Instead, it is essentially an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework. Task Manager shows multiple Chromium-based subprocesses running simultaneously, which contributes to the unusually high RAM usage. |
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| ▲ | TacticalCoder an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| All the comments excusing the RAM usage "because high-resolution screens require pixels" are missing the fact that there's this thing called GPU memory. Which is where pixels data should be. There's no way you need to store fullscreen 4K images for a weather app on anything else than the GPU: use scalable icons, render them on the GPU. No need to use actual RAM: the GPUs have had their own RAM since times immemorial and GPU rendering is a thing too. |
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| ▲ | hokkos 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Apple Weather app can jump to 1GB on a mac if you click around a little with the wind gust direction particle effect in the map |
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| ▲ | rdedev 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How much does rainmeter take? I used to load tons of widgets on it in my old laptop. Ahh those were the days |
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| ▲ | drtournier 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| PC games were the last reason why I still used windows. Now that Proton works wonders in Linux, I hope I don’t need to ever come back again. Great times with 98, xp and win7 that were snappy, easy to install and with no slop |
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| ▲ | pixel_popping 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Anything above 50MB RAM for this is shameful imo and reflect poor engineering. |
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| ▲ | dude250711 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Thanks, React and friends. |
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| ▲ | rahulmax an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Windows users are fundamentally willing to put up with more bullshit than MacOS or Linux users." I read this circa 2010 and it stuck with me ever since. Also, have felt this way over the years, when I see Windows users work. |
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| ▲ | SBArbeit 29 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Super interesting; it's been exactly the opposite in my experience. MacOS/iOS users put up with whatever Apple is telling them they should love - Liquid Glass, right? App Store restrictions, right? Lousy AI, right? - whether it's true or not. Linux users are willing to put up with any amount of work - i.e. bullshit - to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago. As for Windows, I like living in cities. If you live in a city long enough - at least through a couple of major macroeconomic cycles - you'll see it improve in some ways and some neighborhoods, get worse in some ways and some neighborhoods, then improve again, etc. Cycles. Windows found itself in a downturn the last few years, primarily due to the org structure that took Windows shell away from people who could really look after it, and, yes some of those execs have earned my permanent scorn, like a bad local politician would. Now there's a focused team making that neighborhood better. I'm here for the whole ride. I'll use Linux on computers I don't have to log into very much, so I don't have that UX problem (case-sensitive command lines? Seriously? The 1970's called...). I'll never move to MacOS City; it's like wanting to live in The Villages. Manicured lawns with no soul. So I live in Windows Town, it's not perfect, no city is, but it's always changing, always moving, going through ups and downs, and now it has a new "city council" that's making changes for the better. And I'm expert enough to make it great for me, and avoid the "neighborhoods" that suck. This article highlights a problem that Windows has right now, and one which I agree with, which is shipping web apps instead of native. For now, I have a workaround for it: 1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge.
2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather.
3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar so I have a Start Menu icon for the page.
4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon. Now I have the same weather site, no ads, running in about 130MB of RAM. Enjoy your choice of operating system. Live where you want. Sometimes your city has problems. Move if you want, but don't think you've permanently solved your UX issues if you do, you've just swapped them for different ones. | | |
| ▲ | shooly 2 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean, if the only things you can name are Liquid Glass, App Store and not-so-intelligent AI then it seems like Apple users are actually doing quite well? It's impossible for every idea to be a hit. Liquid Glass was a miss and they backtracked on some changes and fixed some issues that people were vocal about. | |
| ▲ | keicwifjwud 18 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Liquid Glass, right? App Store restrictions, right? Lousy AI, right? Liquid Glass needs a lot of cleaning up but it’s fine. App Store restrictions mean very little for iOS users in general and next to nothing for Mac users. Lousy AI also means little to nothing on Mac and earns at max a shrug on iOS—you even have a handy little button to disable all Apple Intelligence shenanigans altogether which is something no Windows user can easily do with Copilot. No, Apple users are most definitely not having to deal with the same level of bullshit Microsoft’s users are. And it’s not even close. |
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| ▲ | i-e-b 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The complete works of Shakespeare are about 6MiB. I hate that 100MiB is considered efficient for telling me if it's going to rain later. |
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| ▲ | Wowfunhappy 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| ...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still much cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago. Which matters because the things most consumers are doing on their computers haven't changed in the past 15 years. We browse the web, edit photos, message friends, and so on. AI generally runs on remote servers anyway. For years, everyone kept saying it was fine that Electron used gigabytes of memory, because on modern PCs memory was plentiful anyway. Well, it's not plentiful anymore! Maybe it's time software developers actually used resources efficiently? Hey, you even have an LLM to help you now! |
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| ▲ | AnotherGoodName 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | But it's literally not cheaper than it was ~15 years ago? Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say... | | |
| ▲ | ttoinou 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Nobody would like to use DDR3 right now though, you can get cheap DDR3 DDR2 if you want some | |
| ▲ | gruez 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise. ...when looking at nominal prices (ie. not adjusted for inflation). If you adjust for that the furthest back you can go to get that price is 2011. What's more is that because RAM prices are subject to boom and bust cycles, that price has also been reached in 2015. So just by tweaking two parameters we went from 19 years (2007) to 11 years (2015). | | |
| ▲ | adrian_b an hour ago | parent [-] | | That is correct, DDR5 today is in real US$ slightly cheaper than DRAM was in 2011, 15 years ago. For more than 15 years in the past, the price in real US$ of DRAM per GB was always higher than today. During 2014, there was a brief price peak when DDR3 (the standard current then) was slightly more expensive than DDR5 is today. Still, the fact that now the price per GB is the same as 15 years ago, is bad enough, and it can still become worse. |
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| ▲ | Dylan16807 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We had modern programming toolkits that traded some efficiency for ease of use 20 years ago, along with GPU compositing for maximum smoothness. And that's when Vista came out requiring a whole 1GB to run properly. And other than doubling for 64GB that didn't change through 7, 8, 8.1, 10. Electron was never a great idea but more and more basic things keep moving to it and the result is a disaster. When you use it for several little things at once it turns from annoying waste into massive waste. | |
| ▲ | hinkley 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But we went from 1080p monitors to 5k monitors and so we are pushing 7x the number of pixels and at roughly twice the bits per pixel. | | |
| ▲ | Wowfunhappy an hour ago | parent [-] | | True, but I don't really think that accounts for the increase in memory usage. | | |
| ▲ | hinkley 37 minutes ago | parent [-] | | No but it's the biggest one that's easy to forget. Feature factory work increases the surface area of every API you touch, and the proliferation of pre-written APIs expands the number of APIs you touch. The combination of the two is not quite O(n²) but the exponent is more than 1, so it's still geometric. |
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| ▲ | kasabali 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant. Today 8GB is bare minimum. |
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| ▲ | trashface an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I'm sure the memory pages compress well /s |
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