I use Linux now, so you're on your own if there are issues. It might require some windows library to be installed but I don't recall. I ran it for a long while on win11.
glimshe 2 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
10 MB is ridiculously overbloated. 1 MB or something in that vicinity should be more like it.
magackame 1 hours ago [-]
I think you guys on HN can be a bit out of touch maybe? On my linux machine (measured with tux-manager):
All these apps are what you would consider native, good apps. Written with Qt, GTK, some in low level langs like C\C++, Rust as well. There is of course different ways to measure the usage and maybe some more testing needs to be done, but stuff like 1-10 MB seems completely unrealistic. I think any empty Qt/GTK app eats 40 MB at least. Only thing that even gets close is st at 12 MB. And mind you it's a terminal (which is 1000x simpler than any modern GUI app, doesn't load any assets etc) and it doesn't even use any GPU accel (which itself seem to add a lot of baseline cost).
Honestly I was a bit surprised myself. I have a Rust winit + ash vulkan hardcoded triangle demo app and it eats 86 MB (the binary itself is 5.5 MB). I would love to know, if anyone could explain why GPU accel seems to eat up so much RAM. Like yeah, there are a bunch of images that live on swapchain, but they should all be in VRAM. Outside of that I don't see what would require MBs worth of overhead.
kvemkon 5 minutes ago [-]
> I think any empty Qt/GTK app eats 40 MB at least.
Classic GTK is (much) better (RSS on Linux):
GTK2 14 MB
GTK3 24 MB
Once it was decided that a desktop application must have fancy animation effects (like on smartphones) and be rendered completely on GPU things got very different:
GTK4 98 MB
preg_match 1 hours ago [-]
Yes these are all very, very complex applications though.
But I agree: using more memory is good, actually, because it means more stuff is being cached. Nautilus is probably pre-indexing directory structure so it doesn't have to read disk every single time you open your home folder. That's good. Oh, and thumbnails. Thumbnails are incredibly expensive memory wise, but very useful!
Also modern apps have A LOT built-in. Tons of font management stuff, accessibility, they work on many different environments. I mean, look at everything that goes into a modern terminal emulator.
But... a weather app is much simpler, IMO, than Nautilus or Kitty.
torginus 39 minutes ago [-]
Counterpoint: Nautilus is both slower and less stable than Windows Explorer on large folders, even though the Linux filesystem is much faster. These super-indexed desktop linux search functions are also dog slow, while `grep` and `find` in the terminal are much faster (for searching inside files), and those certainly don't cache anything.
torginus 42 minutes ago [-]
These apps have codebases going back to the 2000s when having 256MB ram total was a big deal, yet these apps could contend with that (while offering pretty much identical functionality). I remember one of the big arguments for GTK against Qt was that C++ relied heavily on templates, thus every C++ app would have their own copies of the same functions in RAM, while GTK was C, and a lot of those library pages could be shared. Qt even did some nonstandard trick to cut down on this duplication, which was unpopular with the C++ people.
ahartmetz 39 seconds ago [-]
AFAIK, Qt's C++ extensions (moc, meta-object compiler) have nothing to do with how it reduces template bloat from containers, which is by moving some type-independent implementation parts to shared methods.
binaryturtle 1 hours ago [-]
`ansiweather` needs like ~6.28 MiB (measured with `/usr/bin/time -l` on OS X), but it's a bash script that invokes cURL, so there's certainly various overheads there too.
One probably could get this down way below ~1 MiB with a properly tuned straight executable written in C (best not to use any of the "modern" stuff like Rust and Go, their default binary sizes for outputting "Hello, world!\n" are already extreme :-) )
By default anything needs at least 532480 bytes RSS on OSX (I tested it with the most minimal C hello world), so that's a threshold one probably can't beat on OS X at least. We probably could kill that value on Amiga OS with the exact same functionality. :-)
Const-me 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
2 bit 160x144px ought to be enough for anything
khazhoux 1 hours ago [-]
Look at Richie Rich over here with his 2 bits!
2 hours ago [-]
perching_aix 2 hours ago [-]
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.
torginus 27 minutes ago [-]
One thing shared between old software rendered desktops and modern videogames is that they shunned these intermediate 'composited' screens. On the desktop, there used to be the screen, and basically windows used to draw on top of each other, there was no intermediate buffer for the whole window to draw itself to, which would then be smushed together with all others.
Video games are the same (mostly) - everything is rendered in screen space for performance reasons, it's very, very rare, that you would render something into a temporary buffer then composite it on top of the rest of the scene - you would need exceptional reasons for that.
Maybe it's time to get back to the olden days of display servers - where applications would push a list of render commands to the 'display server', which would consist of rendering primitives, which would then take these commands and construct the whole UI on the screen, without the intermediate steps of each app drawing into its own little buffer.
You could always fall back to drawing your own applciations, then asking the display server to composite that, but that would pretty much be the exception, not the norm.
Const-me 1 hours ago [-]
True, but many modern computers are using unified memory. On such systems all memory is almost equal, despite often reported differently.
For example, on my 5 years old laptop with integrated AMD GPU, windows 10 calculator in default state uses 33 MB system RAM, 9.6 MB dedicated VRAM. Maximized to FullHD screen, same app uses 36 MB system RAM, 13 MB dedicated VRAM. Maybe the OS counts VRAM as active private working set, maybe the app uses more than 1 buffer.
Regardless of the reason, it’s IMO unrealistic to expect a modern GUI app to consume less memory than required for the frame buffer for its window.
3 hours ago [-]
david-gpu 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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, in aggregate, macOS being more efficient is something that lets Apple sell a lower spec product while still justifying a higher price and thus better margins for Apple.
bilekas 2 hours ago [-]
Let's not ignore the new "windows copilot laptops" that come with 4GiB.
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cdud3 2 hours ago [-]
Correct.
Telaneo 2 hours ago [-]
Many of those things are already in memory just from running an empty desktop.
rpdillon 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Even 1MB is too much. I expect a modern weather app to be <20K.
cogman10 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
That's still 26x more than the size of the display buffer, I would never settle for such bloat /s
userbinator 48 minutes ago [-]
The article now says for me "By comparison, Apple's native Weather app on macOS uses roughly five times less memory under similar conditions."... which is not exactly the same wording.
Edit: I see the "250MB" line later in the article. This article is itself bloated for repeating nearly the same thing again.
loehnsberg 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
Run those things as an electron app? Add on analytics, location tracking and data exfil and you'll be fairly close
thrance 55 minutes ago [-]
The most lightweight solution I can think of is:
curl wttr.in
alwillis 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
GuB-42 20 minutes ago [-]
Putting aside the fact that it is horribly bloated. Accurately measuring RAM usage is tricky, there are several measurements, and no "right" one.
It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it.
The thing that the task manager doesn't tell you is whether or not these are shared components. It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components, so killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space as you may hope, instead, it would require killing every user of the component, some may be core system apps.
In addition to the distinction between private and shared memory, there is also the distinction between actual RAM usage and and virtual memory. It is possible for a process to memory map a 100 GB file. If you look at the address space, it will take 100 GB more of virtual memory, even though it may be actually zero physical RAM, but it is not always zero either, the parts of the file that are currently accessed take up some space, which may later be reclaimed by the OS by committing the page to disk.
Even the most obvious "I do a big malloc()" kind of memory use is not that obvious, the OS can overcommit, put stuff into swap, use memory compression, etc... And it can do that even if the system is not overloaded, as to make more space for the disk cache for instance.
So seeing "1 GB" in the task manager is just a vague hint of how it may affect performance. And not all "task manager" tools give the same value for the same program (so Windows vs Mac may be misleading). "Process Explorer", a more advanced version of the Windows task manager can give a lot more details, with different values of memory usage depending on what you are looking at.
waynesonfire 7 minutes ago [-]
> the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components
Fine, shutdown the weather and stock ticker apps.
ndriscoll 3 hours ago [-]
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.
glouwbug 3 hours ago [-]
Fun fact, one of the XFire cofounders won Carmack's Ferrari at a Quake Tourney:
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.)
aniceperson 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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,
Catloafdev 49 minutes ago [-]
This is a narrative that MS, Google etc want you to believe. They gutted it for ads. That's what's happening. There are workarounds now, that's what the existing ad block options are. They are heavily kneecapped.
fakwandi_priv 45 minutes ago [-]
> According to Windows Latest, the high memory consumption is due to the fact that Weather is not a fully native Windows application. Instead, it is essentially an MSN Weather web app built on Microsoft's WebView2 framework.
I wonder how this approach is having such an high reduction in memory usage compared to what’s stated in the article. I would assume both use the exact same WebView here.
The only explanation here that I can think of would be that the “Add an application” starts it under an existing Edge process which shares it’s memory instead of completely isolated.
cogman10 2 hours ago [-]
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.
pjmlp 2 hours ago [-]
Which is what OSes implemented in system languages with automatic memory management usually do, it is an OS service.
Bare metal Java, Go, .NET, Erlang, OCaml,... with bare metal deployments naturally have the runtime take the OS role.
mwkaufma 2 hours ago [-]
The ram usage in this case is an order of magnitude lower if you install ublock in edge, as other comments have noted. Why would a system level GC affect wasteful adtech?
Any marginal efficiency gains will be wiped out with more adslop. Nathan's law.
itopaloglu83 4 hours ago [-]
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?
mort96 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
“What value are you bringing to the company?” translates to “if you’re not printing money, you lose your job.”
dasyud 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mpyne 40 minutes ago [-]
This risks getting into the Fisherian/Bayesian stats wars again, but it would be possible to project a revenue gain, even in advance of making the change. You'd do this in terms of improved customer retention, lower cost of future customer acquisition, increased price a Teams license could sustain based on a rep for higher reliability, etc.
Obviously it's not a change that you'd be able to pin a specific human decision-maker (who was marginal on Teams) down as to this change being the difference between a sale or not, but nor is the change in revenue going to be a random number uniformly distributed in (-∞,∞).
If the change was revenue-neutral, the skip level would probably have been justified in seeing if the teams working that project could have found something to do customers actually care about instead.
dasyud 4 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
mapontosevenths 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
Yet they're the ones who get promoted because their KPIs are the best.
Don't they even had it earlyer and even let the DNS expire, so someone else could spam the startmenu?
bossyTeacher 3 hours ago [-]
They do. Never forget, Microsoft's goal is to squeeze as much money from you as possible.
dabinat 3 hours ago [-]
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.
firefoxd 3 hours ago [-]
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.
mort96 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
>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 2 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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
28 minutes ago [-]
ashleyn 2 hours ago [-]
A lot of these applications run in Electron or similar libraries where a whole new browser instance, with all its overhead, is stood up for each application. The simplest answer is we need to stop trying to use web technologies as a one-size-fits-all GUI toolkit.
lelanthran 60 minutes ago [-]
> This took me down a rabbit whole.
The rabbit was too hungry to even stop to chew you?
trzy 3 hours ago [-]
The visual assets alone will be tens of megabytes.
anonymars 3 hours ago [-]
Why, though? You need some icons and some map imagery, not 4K texture maps
chneu 3 hours ago [-]
Its 2026. You need 4k assets for job security.
iAMkenough 3 hours ago [-]
For a weather app, you should be able to get by with a couple base vectors you modify based on conditions.
mort96 3 hours ago [-]
On disk yeah, sure. But you're gonna render them into a pixel buffer which lives in memory.
samrus 3 hours ago [-]
How did applications do it before? Like in the 90s or 00s
mort96 3 hours ago [-]
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.
1 hours ago [-]
1 hours ago [-]
nicoburns 3 hours ago [-]
They had fewer graphics, and much lower resolution screens.
Dylan16807 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
vel0city 3 hours ago [-]
> 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 2 hours ago [-]
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-ish things ran in lower color, but this is about desktop mode and I never saw a desktop mode that struggled based on color depth.
Micrococonut 3 hours ago [-]
Should be able to get by with using system graphics
SV_BubbleTime 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
Even if the app is no longer using that memory it is not released until Windows thinks another app needs it.
vel0city 3 hours ago [-]
And then people complain about how unresponsive applications are, all these little stutters as things pop in.
znpy 3 hours ago [-]
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
After seeing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226923 show up here, I'm now hoping someone will vibe-code a nearly identical-looking native app that takes a few orders of magnitude less RAM.
Personally I just use my government's website when I need to check the forecast.
iamcoder18 4 hours ago [-]
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.
karmakurtisaani 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
Back in my days, I had to remove the mouse driver from autoexec so that microprose grand pirx had 600kb of ram to start
baal80spam 40 minutes ago [-]
Good times.
SV_BubbleTime 3 hours ago [-]
Had to get a ride to drive floppies with corrected config.sys and autoexec.bat files around to friends.
Things weren’t actually worse.
iinnPP 53 minutes ago [-]
Personally, I have reverted back to sneakernet in a lot of what I do.
kevin_thibedeau 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
LumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM.
drdaeman 4 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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
keicwifjwud 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
vinyl7 1 hours ago [-]
99% of apps have the same or less functionality today as they did in 2001, but are significantly slower and worse.
chrisandchris 51 minutes ago [-]
Functionality isn't everything. A human teller has the (more or less) same functionality as online banking, but I do love me some online banking.
I also like the weather icons being 4K and having some smooth anmiations.
Not to say that it's gone worse (it has IMHO) but comparing 25 years ago to know doesn't help much. Times were different back then. That's like comparing 1900 travel to today.
e2le 4 hours ago [-]
What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive.
kevincox 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Those still have to be rasterised to a pixel-based frame buffer at render/compositing time.
useasvg 4 hours ago [-]
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.
preg_match 1 hours ago [-]
SVG is an on-disk format. It has to be rasterized, otherwise how do you have pixels? Each pixel takes up memory.
qlm 3 hours ago [-]
Quite a tasteless metaphor, no?
puzzleincomplet 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cyberrock 3 hours ago [-]
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.
p1mrx 4 hours ago [-]
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:
I am pretty sure xfce4 weather plugin takes a lot less.
Throwthrowbob 3 hours ago [-]
Looks like about 30 MiB with a quick test.
satvikpendem 4 hours ago [-]
You don't need anything more than https://wttr.in/ even with all the fancy terminal graphics.
cissikatt 45 minutes ago [-]
Why would I like to know the weather in some other city?
satvikpendem 28 minutes ago [-]
What do you mean? It gets the weather for your city via your IP address, maybe you're on a VPN.
benj111 3 hours ago [-]
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.
kmfrk 2 hours ago [-]
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.
My country's agency for weather and water mgmt has consistently the best 48h forecast. Try looking for an equivalent in yours.
w4yai 3 hours ago [-]
Please, Microsoft, PLEASE ! You can do BETTER ! Stop acting like an internship for every single feature you add ! Where's the money going ?
fsflover 57 minutes ago [-]
But will the earn more money by offering a better weather app?
3dedb728-3f77 21 minutes ago [-]
What if we make all these apps obsolete with < 1mb options.
100 tools < 100mb.
feverzsj 4 hours ago [-]
It's just msn weather page. Can't they use one single browser for all their apps instead of one per app?
whynotmaybe 4 hours ago [-]
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
CrimsonCape 3 hours ago [-]
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.
hyperhello 4 hours ago [-]
I would like to be assured that the author knows the difference between actual memory and setting aside paging space.
tredre3 2 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
That still isn't a good look.
hyperhello 3 hours ago [-]
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.
debazel 59 minutes ago [-]
On Windows over allocating virtual memory (commit charge) is still bad. Unlike on Linux, once the total commit charge hits your physical RAM limit + SWAP limit, Windows will start crashing your applications and refuse to allocate more virtual memory, even if that memory has not been touched yet.
This is also why it is very important to have plenty of SWAP space on Windows, even if you have 64 GiB+ of memory. Because applications love to over allocate commit charge.
cromka 2 hours ago [-]
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.
alkonaut 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Dwedit 1 hours ago [-]
This is what happens when you start a separate instance of Chromium everywhere.
TacticalCoder 3 hours ago [-]
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.
hokkos 3 hours ago [-]
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
calini 3 hours ago [-]
The Weather app in Windows is more ads than weather, so it checks out.
dietr1ch 3 hours ago [-]
At some point you just got to be amazed at it and celebrate.
strong-self 2 hours ago [-]
i used WKWebView highlightr wrapper around highlight.js for syntax highlighting on iOS, and the webview was the biggest memory line in the app
mmis1000 22 minutes ago [-]
i mean webKit never handle viewport well when compare to firefox or chrome. it's willing to materialize a 10000*10000 texture when firefox and chrome will think that is too dumb and only load the visible part. It's not a good target if you want to compare windows and mac software quality.
dude250711 3 hours ago [-]
Thanks, React and friends.
rdedev 3 hours ago [-]
How much does rainmeter take? I used to load tons of widgets on it in my old laptop. Ahh those were the days
drtournier 4 hours ago [-]
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
Wowfunhappy 4 hours ago [-]
...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!
AnotherGoodName 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Nobody would like to use DDR3 right now though, you can get cheap DDR3 DDR2 if you want some
gruez 3 hours ago [-]
>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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Dylan16807 3 hours ago [-]
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.
baist0 59 minutes ago [-]
moder engineers.
baist0 1 hours ago [-]
You are destroying the subtle mechanism of corporate enrichment.
kasabali 3 hours ago [-]
15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant.
Today 8GB is bare minimum.
Wowfunhappy 4 minutes ago [-]
Exactly, isn't that nuts? Especially when we're now paying 15-years-ago prices per gigabyte. What are we getting for that additional space?
hinkley 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
True, but I don't really think that accounts for the increase in memory usage.
hinkley 2 hours ago [-]
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.
baist0 2 hours ago [-]
This is what traditions mean!
undebuggable 2 hours ago [-]
An app which could have been a website.
superjan 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
rahulmax 3 hours ago [-]
"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.
SBArbeit 2 hours ago [-]
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.
torh 1 hours ago [-]
> to make their installations work just to get a UX that's almost as good as Windows from 20 years ago
To be fair, that was the peak of Windows UI. Also, KDE Plasma is way ahead of Windows (any of them).
preg_match 1 hours ago [-]
I agree, KDE Plasma runs circles around every UX available now or at any time in the past. And it's not even close.
I've tried using MacOS, and there are so many frustrating things you just have to put up with. Windows is much worse, but to be fair Windows was okay at one point. KDE is, out of the box, seamless, sensible, fast, and unbelievably feature-packed. But even if the default experience isn't your taste, it's trivial to customize it to work however you want. Whatever panels you want, where ever you want, with whatever widgets you want. WYSIWYG with point-and-click. And the windows, too. Window rules, KWin scripts (which are actually full-blown plugins), whatever you want. I want Steam to always open full screen on start up on my second monitor on the third desktop? Sure, I can do that, again point-and-click.
I truly cannot sign the praises of KDE enough. I think everyone who dislikes KDE has probably not delved deep enough. I can recreate the entire GNOME desktop in KDE in an hour. I can recreate MacOS in 30 minutes.
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.
rstat1 1 hours ago [-]
>> 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
I put in the exact same amount of effort to install a Linux distro on my laptop that I would have to install Windows.
1. Download the ISO
2. Write to a USB drive
3. Reboot
4. Run the installer.
5. ???
6. Profit
And all for an experience with way less bloat, none of the bundled spyware, more consistent UI design (depending on which desktop you're using), and better perceived performance.
>>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:
This is still a web app, it doesn't solve the problem of MS being too lazy or cheap to make real desktop apps for things. I mean this is the same company who thought taking the Start Menu of all things and re-making it with web crap was a good idea.
shooly 2 hours ago [-]
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.
SBArbeit 2 hours ago [-]
I can name lots of things I can't stand about MacOS and iOS and Apple hardware, but that wasn't the point of the comment. Some of the things I can't stand about Apple are things that people used to Apple's stuff don't mind. Cool for you. But I'm still not moving to The Villages, ever.
shooly 1 hours ago [-]
> things that people used to Apple's stuff don't mind
... but that's what you said about Windows:
> Windows found itself in a downturn the last few years
> I live in Windows Town, it's not perfect, no city is
> [...] avoid the "neighborhoods" that suck
Really the original comment just reads like you wanted to rant about Apple users and MacOS and that's it. You didn't really give any strong arguments for why Windows is better than MacOS - and "it's not perfect" is not an argument when in the same post you say the exact same about your preferred OS.
That's also bloated, couldn't they find a better comparison to illustrate the egregious waste?
But yeah, I still remember when a weather app would take 10 MB and I was complaining (1999)
https://github.com/derac/WeatherTray
I use Linux now, so you're on your own if there are issues. It might require some windows library to be installed but I don't recall. I ran it for a long while on win11.
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.
Honestly I was a bit surprised myself. I have a Rust winit + ash vulkan hardcoded triangle demo app and it eats 86 MB (the binary itself is 5.5 MB). I would love to know, if anyone could explain why GPU accel seems to eat up so much RAM. Like yeah, there are a bunch of images that live on swapchain, but they should all be in VRAM. Outside of that I don't see what would require MBs worth of overhead.
Classic GTK is (much) better (RSS on Linux):
Once it was decided that a desktop application must have fancy animation effects (like on smartphones) and be rendered completely on GPU things got very different:But I agree: using more memory is good, actually, because it means more stuff is being cached. Nautilus is probably pre-indexing directory structure so it doesn't have to read disk every single time you open your home folder. That's good. Oh, and thumbnails. Thumbnails are incredibly expensive memory wise, but very useful!
Also modern apps have A LOT built-in. Tons of font management stuff, accessibility, they work on many different environments. I mean, look at everything that goes into a modern terminal emulator.
But... a weather app is much simpler, IMO, than Nautilus or Kitty.
One probably could get this down way below ~1 MiB with a properly tuned straight executable written in C (best not to use any of the "modern" stuff like Rust and Go, their default binary sizes for outputting "Hello, world!\n" are already extreme :-) )
By default anything needs at least 532480 bytes RSS on OSX (I tested it with the most minimal C hello world), so that's a threshold one probably can't beat on OS X at least. We probably could kill that value on Amiga OS with the exact same functionality. :-)
They clearly spent it on maintaining their independent Chromium instance instead.
Video games are the same (mostly) - everything is rendered in screen space for performance reasons, it's very, very rare, that you would render something into a temporary buffer then composite it on top of the rest of the scene - you would need exceptional reasons for that.
Maybe it's time to get back to the olden days of display servers - where applications would push a list of render commands to the 'display server', which would consist of rendering primitives, which would then take these commands and construct the whole UI on the screen, without the intermediate steps of each app drawing into its own little buffer.
You could always fall back to drawing your own applciations, then asking the display server to composite that, but that would pretty much be the exception, not the norm.
For example, on my 5 years old laptop with integrated AMD GPU, windows 10 calculator in default state uses 33 MB system RAM, 9.6 MB dedicated VRAM. Maximized to FullHD screen, same app uses 36 MB system RAM, 13 MB dedicated VRAM. Maybe the OS counts VRAM as active private working set, maybe the app uses more than 1 buffer.
Regardless of the reason, it’s IMO unrealistic to expect a modern GUI app to consume less memory than required for the frame buffer for its window.
The world doesn't run on personal aesthetics, when nobody is willing to pay for them.
https://en.gamegpu.com/news/zhelezo/defitsit-pamyati-zastavi...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205592
For an extreme example:
Inside of a conky widget would do the trick, I think.https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/wiki/Lua:-Shell-Integra...
Edit: I see the "250MB" line later in the article. This article is itself bloated for repeating nearly the same thing again.
It is clear from the article that what eats up so much RAM is not the weather app itself but the framework it runs on. There is a "Renderer", a "GPU Process",... eating most of it.
The thing that the task manager doesn't tell you is whether or not these are shared components. It may be that the 662 MB used by the "Renderer" is shared between many Windows components, so killing that Weather app may not reclaim as much space as you may hope, instead, it would require killing every user of the component, some may be core system apps.
In addition to the distinction between private and shared memory, there is also the distinction between actual RAM usage and and virtual memory. It is possible for a process to memory map a 100 GB file. If you look at the address space, it will take 100 GB more of virtual memory, even though it may be actually zero physical RAM, but it is not always zero either, the parts of the file that are currently accessed take up some space, which may later be reclaimed by the OS by committing the page to disk.
Even the most obvious "I do a big malloc()" kind of memory use is not that obvious, the OS can overcommit, put stuff into swap, use memory compression, etc... And it can do that even if the system is not overloaded, as to make more space for the disk cache for instance.
So seeing "1 GB" in the task manager is just a vague hint of how it may affect performance. And not all "task manager" tools give the same value for the same program (so Windows vs Mac may be misleading). "Process Explorer", a more advanced version of the Windows task manager can give a lot more details, with different values of memory usage depending on what you are looking at.
Fine, shutdown the weather and stock ticker apps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Fong#/media/File:John_C...
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.)
not even being annoying, edge is removing manifest v2 very soon, breaking proper ad blocks just like chrome
UBO Lite (the MV3 version of UBO) seems to work just fine in my experience, at the core function of being an ad blocker,
I wonder how this approach is having such an high reduction in memory usage compared to what’s stated in the article. I would assume both use the exact same WebView here.
The only explanation here that I can think of would be that the “Add an application” starts it under an existing Edge process which shares it’s memory instead of completely isolated.
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.
Oberon example,
https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/Sources/Kerne...
Active Oberon example,
https://github.com/btreut/a2/blob/master/source/GarbageColle...
Bare metal Java, Go, .NET, Erlang, OCaml,... with bare metal deployments naturally have the runtime take the OS role.
Any marginal efficiency gains will be wiped out with more adslop. Nathan's law.
Really Microsoft? Do you really need all the ads revenue from the weather app?
What’s next? Ads on the start menu?
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.
Obviously it's not a change that you'd be able to pin a specific human decision-maker (who was marginal on Teams) down as to this change being the difference between a sale or not, but nor is the change in revenue going to be a random number uniformly distributed in (-∞,∞).
If the change was revenue-neutral, the skip level would probably have been justified in seeing if the teams working that project could have found something to do customers actually care about instead.
They already exist: https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-start-menu-ads-how-to-t...
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.
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.)
Sometimes, you need to tell the designers NO. Moving background images don't help people figure out what the weather is going to be.
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.
The rabbit was too hungry to even stop to chew you?
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.
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.
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.
And yeah lots of fullscreen-ish things ran in lower color, but this is about desktop mode and I never saw a desktop mode that struggled based on color depth.
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.
Personally I just use my government's website when I need to check the forecast.
Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.
Things weren’t actually worse.
They "could" make it easy but why bother? I assume next update will make calculator 1 gb download, 2gb ram resident and ADS
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.
I also like the weather icons being 4K and having some smooth anmiations.
Not to say that it's gone worse (it has IMHO) but comparing 25 years ago to know doesn't help much. Times were different back then. That's like comparing 1900 travel to today.
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.
Or render everything using css, 100mb is someone not trying. 1gb is absurd abuse that only domestic violence victims put up with.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse...
https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...
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/
100 tools < 100mb.
- 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.
This is also why it is very important to have plenty of SWAP space on Windows, even if you have 64 GiB+ of memory. Because applications love to over allocate commit charge.
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.
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.
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!
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...
...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).
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.
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.
Today 8GB is bare minimum.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
To be fair, that was the peak of Windows UI. Also, KDE Plasma is way ahead of Windows (any of them).
I've tried using MacOS, and there are so many frustrating things you just have to put up with. Windows is much worse, but to be fair Windows was okay at one point. KDE is, out of the box, seamless, sensible, fast, and unbelievably feature-packed. But even if the default experience isn't your taste, it's trivial to customize it to work however you want. Whatever panels you want, where ever you want, with whatever widgets you want. WYSIWYG with point-and-click. And the windows, too. Window rules, KWin scripts (which are actually full-blown plugins), whatever you want. I want Steam to always open full screen on start up on my second monitor on the third desktop? Sure, I can do that, again point-and-click.
I truly cannot sign the praises of KDE enough. I think everyone who dislikes KDE has probably not delved deep enough. I can recreate the entire GNOME desktop in KDE in an hour. I can recreate MacOS in 30 minutes.
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.
I put in the exact same amount of effort to install a Linux distro on my laptop that I would have to install Windows.
1. Download the ISO 2. Write to a USB drive 3. Reboot 4. Run the installer. 5. ??? 6. Profit
And all for an experience with way less bloat, none of the bundled spyware, more consistent UI design (depending on which desktop you're using), and better perceived performance.
>>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:
This is still a web app, it doesn't solve the problem of MS being too lazy or cheap to make real desktop apps for things. I mean this is the same company who thought taking the Start Menu of all things and re-making it with web crap was a good idea.
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.
... but that's what you said about Windows:
> Windows found itself in a downturn the last few years
> I live in Windows Town, it's not perfect, no city is
> [...] avoid the "neighborhoods" that suck
Really the original comment just reads like you wanted to rant about Apple users and MacOS and that's it. You didn't really give any strong arguments for why Windows is better than MacOS - and "it's not perfect" is not an argument when in the same post you say the exact same about your preferred OS.
1196 points by ajdude on March 3, 2025 | 1213 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075
As always, Captain Obvious is quick to respond.