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.)
"Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM"
What a wonderful world we have created where the fix for a 1GB RAM guzzler reduces it to a mere 130MB.
Now I could start off with my old ZX80 or even my C64 (which is doing fine, thanks, and sports a USB "drive" next to its Quickshot II) but I think my first 80486 is a realistic comparison.
That ran at 25MHz, had a maths co-pro in it had 4MB RAM, a 20MB IDE HDD and I think the Orchid graphics card had 0.5MB RAM. The monitor was of course a 14" CRT VGA. OK so late 1980s!
However, that thing could run Win 3.1 and Word 2 and I think I managed to wedge a dodgy copy of Quark Express on it. I could play F117 and other games on it.
Oh well, lets see what this Linux box has on it:
/usr/bin/inxi - 1.4MB
Obviously, I could install a Flatpak to do that instead and waste far more resources 8)What inxi commnd shows a map of pollen concentration, weather alerts, and air quality? How do you generate a graph comparing this year's temperatures to the previous yeas' average climate?
Comparing inxi to Windows Weather is like comparing vi to Autodesk. You can make 3d graphics for sure, but it's not exactly comparable.
When I run inxi -w, I get this:
Looks like something in my powerline config somewhere must be querying too much? I can't find anything on my systems, must be a very old misconfiguration on my end. I still think I prefer the Microsoft tool.> Your access to this resource has been blocked.
Do you have VPN enabled?
1. install ublock origin on Firefox.
not even being annoying, edge is removing manifest v2 very soon, breaking proper ad blocks just like chrome
Firefox doesn't support PWAs on desktop and removed their previous self-designed equivalent years ago. It's the reason Brave is still running in the background on my machines.
>Firefox doesn't support PWAs on desktop
Are you sure? I still see the "add tab to taskbar" option in the address bar and clicking it open the tab in a new window and shows a popup to pin the tab to the taskbar.
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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.
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No, but you failed to comprehend the section of my comment where I mentioned "workarounds [...] are what the existing ad blockers now use"
MV3 is severely limited in what it can do. One example that blew my mind is that chrome happily renders webpages immediately after application launch, while extensions are still loading.
Firefox, in contrast, doesn't let the network request fire off to the page until every extension is ready. So chrome is essentially screwing over the user, letting ads/ blocked content load, and intentionally degrading their experience, to make things appear slightly faster.
That's nothing to do with MV3 though, that was also true with MV2. The situation actually seems improved in MV3, because static (and dynamic, IIRC) DNR rules are initialized and enforced immediately, right?
>MV3 is severely limited in what it can do.
Yet, I never see ads since ad blockers still have enough power to block ads.
“If I can’t see it, it must not be there”
That's the point of an adblocker. Web pages have ads, but with the extension they aren't there.
uBlock does a lot more than just block ads, is the thing, and that's what they killed with MV3.
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/uBlock-Origin-works-b...
Another easy workaround:
1. Install Linux with KDE
2. Turn on weather report widget
3. Enjoy :)
PS: You've also solved the mandatory account requirement, adds all over the OS, "Copilot" everywhere, Edge constantly coming back and much more <3
For the Windows look and feel, I recommend Mint + Cinnamon. It took me about 15min to not miss anything on Windows and was shocked how I had forgotten how clean a system can be.
Mandatory Windows accounts can still be circumvented with a console command for Win 11 installations, but the overall enshitification package just got worse and worse.
Cinnamon is X11, but it works very well.
Yeah I love KDE especially because it doesn't force a certain look and feel, it's super configurable out of the box and even more if you install themes and plugins (which I don't even do).
> 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.
Yes, using an already-running Edge instance saves a bunch of memory. Also, this approach has the advantage of allowing all of your browser extensions to modify your Web-App experience. WebView2 doesn't relay Edge extensions.
WebView2 has some memory optimizations across several WebView2 instances, so it should save memory once you have multiple WebView2 apps running.
The weather app isn't a native app either:
> 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. Task Manager shows multiple Chromium-based subprocesses running simultaneously, which contributes to the unusually high RAM usage.
If you have Edge or Chrome open (or anything else that similarly uses Chromium) then the incremental increase in RAM usage from the Weather app is likely much smaller than the headline 1GB.
Reminder that all Chromium browsers are hostile to adblockers and are actively removing them.
Use Firefox with uBlock Origin, do not use Chrome, Chromium, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc.
Doesn't Brave have an inbuilt ad blocker?
Brave has a workaround to make some v2 extensions work, including ublock origin
it does, and works almost as well as ublock for most things, but isn't nearly as flexible.
> Easy workaround for this
Wipe Windows from your machine. Use Arch Linux. Problem solved.
The most-difficult part of installing any Linux distro is getting the motivation to create the boot media. Luckily for Ubuntu (I'm running v26) you can use an old HD or USB and then [your flavor of LLM] to then walk you through the steps on how to make the media bootable (at least: that's what I did). I am a bluecollar electrician (yes, it took me a few tries; yes, I accidentally fucked up my first few OS's doing stupid not-recommended shit).
----
Highly recommend Ubuntu; I've dabbled in the past, but the fact that AMD and nVIDIA drivers are pre-installed, in a user-friendly GUI installer... is what has helped me make Linux my main desktop (over the past half-year). Bought a Microcenter prebuilt and never even booten Win11 (straight to Ubuntu installer).
Over the past three decades, I have really tried to like several Linux'es, but have always reverted to (e.g:) Win7 or MacOS. Being able to run local LLM-models is what led me to Ubuntu (RX580->VEGA64->5070Ti)... it's been a journey =P
Sidenote: "AMD Drivers", in the sense of "something you have to download and install manually", are not a thing any more, fortunately. It's just nvidia now.
In Debian, even nvidia drivers are part of the OS repositories, albeit in the non-free category which is not enabled by default. I would be surprised if Ubuntu did not have them too.
What if they had usb drives with Linux installers in blister packs at electronics stores?
Agree with this. As much as Ubuntu is derided for several reasons, it just works. I tinkered with different distros for years, and while it was super fun, I wasn't very productive. Ubuntu and Fedora are the only distros where stuff just worked for me.
Doesn't help if in the end most GUI applications even on Linux, are Electron junk like this weather app, as this lack of respect for the user is everywhere.
"I know web, I deliver packaged web".
Yeah but instead of “hostile OS, hostile applications, subpar applications”, you can reduce it to just “occasionally subpar applications”.
Getting off a hostile OS should be such an obvious choice we oughtn’t need to specify it, but here we are.
I too want to shout how it's the Year of the Linux Desktop but I've been fighting mate-clock-applet recently. It has a memory leak, somewhere, and it slowly consumes RAM.
Normally though it's ~65 MiB for both clock & weather.
Also mate-screenshot is leaking RAM/processes. About ~40 MiB leaked per screenshot.
These things do tend to get fixed over time, though.
Been using Gnome on Arch, it's been unbelievably stable
waiting for a quick simple straight forward tool on github that takes care of this... Anyone?
https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/releases
or
https://unetbootin.github.io/#distros
A better workaround is to install Linux. My entire operating system, which includes Niri window manager and Dank Linux running a weather app, among many other things takes less around 1 gig of ram.
Yes, switching operating systems is a reasonable alternative to switching weather apps