> By comparison, Apple's native Weather app on macOS reportedly uses less than 250 MB of RAM<p>That's also bloated, couldn't they find a better comparison to illustrate the egregious waste?
My gaming PC 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.
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.<p>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.
And it also ads on it.<p>Really Microsoft? Do you really need all the ads revenue from the weather app?<p>What’s next? Ads on the start menu?
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.<p>And it makes the middle manager happy because it lets that middle manager report better numbers to <i>their</i> superiors again.<p>Etc.<p>It's why all large dysfunctional organisations do self destructive stuff like this.
> What’s next? Ads on the start menu?<p>They already exist: <a href="https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-start-menu-ads-how-to-turn-them-off/" rel="nofollow">https://www.howtogeek.com/windows-11-start-menu-ads-how-to-t...</a>
How much does rainmeter take? I used to load tons of widgets on it in my old laptop. Ahh those were the days
At some point you just got to be amazed at it and celebrate.
Please, Microsoft, PLEASE ! You can do BETTER ! Stop acting like an internship for every single feature you add ! Where's the money going ?
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.
What is the weather app doing that it requires 100MB? For such a simple application, that seems excessive.
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.
If I full-screen it in high enough resolution it can be excused for using 100MB temporarily.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.
<a href="https://wttr.in/" rel="nofollow">https://wttr.in/</a> shows it's very possible.
Use an svg.<p>Or render everything using css, 100mb is someone not trying. 1gb is absurd abuse that only domestic violence victims put up with.
[dead]
This has strong "How much could a banana cost? 10 dollars?" vibes.<p>Back in my day 100MB was all you had for all your compute, and somehow programs still ran.
Back in my days, I had to remove the mouse driver from autoexec so that microprose grand pirx had 600kb of ram to start
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.
LumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM.
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:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softseek.com/Education_and_Science/Weather/Review_4251_index.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20010210023051/http://www.softse...</a><p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutuscodeware.com/wetsock_ss.htm" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20070210195451/http://www.locutu...</a>
You don't need anything more than <a href="https://wttr.in/" rel="nofollow">https://wttr.in/</a> even with all the fancy terminal graphics.
I am pretty sure xfce4 weather plugin takes a lot less.
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.
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
It's just msn weather page. Can't they use one single browser for all their apps instead of one per app?
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
I would like to be assured that the author knows the difference between actual memory and setting aside paging space.
...you know, I keep reading all this stuff about memory prices, and it does suck, but memory is still <i>much</i> cheaper per gigabyte than it was ~15 years ago.<p>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.<p>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?<p>Hey, you even have an LLM to help you now!
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.<p><a href="https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-says-ram-pricing-has-reverted-to-normalized-2007-levels-memory-prices-have-been-falling-exponentially-for-decades-but-the-ai-shortage-undid-20-years-of-progress-in-a-matter-of-months" rel="nofollow">https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/scientist-say...</a>
>Right now RAM is the same price per GB as it was in 2007 and prices per GB look to continue to rise.<p>...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).
15 years ago 4GB was comfortable and 8GB was abundant.<p>Today 8GB is bare minimum.
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