Honestly the one upside of this RAM crisis is that people are finally paying attention to how bloated modern software has gotten
1.2GB of ram to show a few images and numbers is patently insane though
this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2026
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Remember, Windows 11 is using an entire Skyrim worth of RAM at startup, usually even more than that, since 8GB is barely enough for Win11 these days, and Skyrim's recommended RAM spec was 4 GB.
I’m not sure I could develop that kind of app to use that much memory if I tried short of intentionally consuming RAM.
Few years ago I made an infinite calculator app for fun where each button was also a calculator, and it still used about half as much ram.
When I most recently switched computers, I made an intentional decision to limit the amount of Electron-based applications to a bare minimum, and to focus on using applications that are intentionally designed for resource efficiency. It's been a good choice for managing RAM use.
Who uses these dumb ass apps?
Now this garbage is the bloatware we complain about.
We had Widgets with Win7 that had a lot of potential. They could've fixed the security problem those things had, instead they removed them entirely and gave us this garbage.
macOS still has the widgets 😉
They’re very nice and come in a bunch of different sizes. You can put them on the desktop or on the sidebar.
macOS has a pretty decent desktop/sidebar widget system.
As for the app, where I live, we get a lot of thunderstorms this time of year, so it’s nice to open up the app and get extended weather information once in a while because I don’t watch live TV, so I don’t get live weather reports from the news. The macOS weather app is very nice.
It’s also very tiny and lightweight. I wouldn’t exactly call it “bloatwear”
Well, wasn't talking about Mac here, but the MS implementation.
And anything more than tens of megabytes for an icon on the taskbar is bloatware. It's not like pulling this data is hard.
Additionally, I get that same data in a few megabytes on my phone. Why the hell does a desktop app need multiple orders of magnitude more ram, even considering the difference in environment?
And anything more than tens of megabytes for an icon on the taskbar is bloatware. It's not like pulling this data is hard.
I agree. On macOS, the Weather app doesn’t run in the background. It’s a full desktop app. Desktop/sidebar weather widgets run in the background, but they only take about 25 MB total.
If you’re telling me that even the taskbar Weather app in Windows 11 takes almost a a gigabyte of RAM (or more??), that’s goddamn bananas.
247MB of RAM sure isn't my idea of lightweight.
It is always fun to compare system requirements for old software with new software.
The recommended amount of RAM to run the original Unreal Tournament game is 64MB.
Same goes for the original Roller Coaster Tycoon 2 game.
Considering everything it’s doing? That’s nothing. And the widget only uses 25 MB.
But keep shifting those goalposts…
Care to elaborate on what goalpost I've shifted? You said it was lightweight, I didn't agree as I feel like 247MB is far too much for showing a weather forecast that was computed elsewhere.
It has been my experience that one cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themselves into.
Very educational and not at all what I asked for. Thank you.
We learn by doing
Indeed. 247 MB is four times as much RAM as is needed to use the full Adobe Premiere 6 video editor. And it is enough memory to run 30 instances of Word 97.
A weather app with images and backend querying can be made to run in ~20 MB RAM with proper optimalisation. The issue is that most developers don't optimize for memory use anymore. Things like data types, heap allocation and copies vs references used to be a primary concern of developers.
Using standards from 30 years ago is hardly a reasonable expectation
lol. Lmao even
Also, that’s why the widgets only take about 25 MB of memory. The Weather app in macOS does a lot more than just the very basics.
It's not an expectation, it's a reference. It's just a fact that software nowadays is not optimized for memory usage, regardless of the platform.
And yes, I'm pretty sure your weather app is fancy but come on man, a weather app is mostly a portal to show cloud data and is totally incomparable to a professional grade video editor, even one from 25 years ago.
The fact that you find it normal that displaying the weather takes up a quarter billion bytes of memory make me think you are relatively young and have never experienced anything other than the software of the past 10 years.
It's not an expectation, it's a reference.
A 30 year-old reference used to rationalize a logically fallacious argument.
And whatever your opinion may be of my weather app, a video editor from 30 years ago is no longer “professional grade”. Oh, and 30 years ago, avid was the professional editing. Suite of choice, followed closely by da Vinci resolve and Final Cut. No professionals used premier. I know, because 30 years ago, I was editing video professionally.
You clearly have some axe to grind, otherwise you wouldn’t be here on a post about a Windows Weather app that uses five times as much RAM as a macOS weather app and still be whining about the macOS weather app, constantly shifting the goalposts 30 years into the past in order to do so, and having to make up stories about how “young” I must be just to rationalize your shitty attitude.
Take it from someone in their late 40s: grow up.
Why so emotional? We are talking about the memory usage of a weather app.
My point is about that 250 MB is a terrible amount of memory for such an application, and that such software isn't updated for memory regardless of the platform. Yes, the Windows one is the most terrible of all.
The fact that you are a video editor is not relevant, nor is the fact that you are older, but it is interesting to read about your past nonetheless. L
Why so emotional? We are talking about the memory usage of a weather app.
lol, you're the one throwing a tantrum over a weather app, using logical fallacies and insults to do so. what a joke.
go touch some grass kid. you're blocked.
Well, I apologize if saying that the remark about you being inexperienced triggered you. Though I must say your first reaction, literally laughing out loud at my contribution is also not the pinnacle of empathy.
This topic is about memory usage so let's stick to that. And blocking is up to you, as it affects your experience and not mine.
Apparently... From what I have been told... Websites are old-fashioned, and younger generations (post Millennial) prefer apps over browsing the internet, especially on mobile.
In chrome at work without an adblocker weather.com can hit 2GB for that tab alone.
Same on plasma with kweather. Uses ~250MB when i open the window. So ~4.8 times less than the windows one.
How does this compare, ram wise, to curl wttr.in ?
you cant. curl wttr.in BARELY takes up any processing power and RAM, the weather app is orders of magnitudes more bloated than that single command.
curl wttr.in uses about 14.6 MB. (16.8 MB with HTTPS)