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SBArbeit

Easy workaround for this:

1. Install uBlock Origin in Edge.

2. Start Edge, browse to MSN Weather.

3. Click the "Add an Application" button in the address bar to get a Start Menu icon for the page.

4. Delete the in-box Weather app icon.

Now you get the same Weather app in about 130MB of RAM, with no ads. It's not as nice as a native app, of course, but it's 1000% better than the useless ads and MSN feed that you can't block from the built-in Weather icon.

(Also, go into Widget settings and turn off "Discover / Microsoft Start feed". Same crap, different surface. Get rid of it.)

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"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

    $ inxi -w Yeovil,UK
    Weather:
      Report: temperature: 16.05 C (61 F) conditions: scattered clouds
      Locale: Yeovil, UK current time: Mon 10 Aug 2026 01:16:05 BST
        Source: OpenWeatherMap.org

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:

    Weather:
     Message: Error: Your access to this resource has been blocked. Automated
       requests or excessive use are not permitted. This is clearly stated in
       both the help menu and man page. If you want a CLI weather tool for
       routine use, try wttr.in, or use a weather widget. Remember, you never
       had a "right" to this feature, it was just a little easter egg, mostly
       for sys admins, which has instead been consistently abused. If you want
       to know your local weather, look out your window, there it is.

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?

Nope. Getting the same error. On the very first usage.

No, but my ISP's IP range once belonged to a business hoster. Wikipedia blocks my IP for that reason too. I'm guessing it has something to do with that, because I can't find inxi references in my config files.

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.

Hmm, after looking around a bit, it looks like they added it (back) to Firefox for Windows, but not for other desktop platforms. Maybe one day.

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.

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).

> Mandatory Windows accounts can still be circumvented with a console command for Win 11 installations

Heard that's patched too

Did it the day before yesterday with a fresh win11 image from Microsoft (no rufus magic or anything). You can press shift + f10 and run a command I don't remember. It restarts the install process and lets you create a local account while it still patches the system before the first start (no fiddling with internet connections required). At least that still works.

At least for an install in vbox under Mint :)

oobe\bypassnro it is.

But there's been some talk about them removing it though there was a more cryptic one as a replacement. Still seems to work on recent versions though.

It was in insider builds yes but it still seems to be 'live' in production builds.

The writing is on the wall though.

> Cinnamon is X11, *so* it works very well.

FIFY

Is that still the case on Linux as well?

I'm on FreeBSD and yes there's still many bugs and nasties in Wayland. It works technically but it's not great, at least alongside KDE.

But I thought on Linux it was a lot further along now.

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.

Shared memory is a separate column, so no

As much as I hate the weather app myself, this isn't an equivalent solution. The weather app shows the temperature in the taskbar itself, without opening anything. Also, I don't keep my browser open 24/7, so it's more than just loading a single extra tab, you need to wait for the browser process itself to start up.

If you want to load weather in a browser from the taskbar instead of having it available without having to open another application, I'd recommend using dillo or some such to load wttr.in or similar. A single http request that loads fast from a comparatively simple application that also loads fast. You might even be able to load it as a .hta file.

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

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?

it does, and works almost as well as ublock for most things, but isn't nearly as flexible.

Brave has a workaround to make some v2 extensions work, including ublock origin

He's talking about the built-in adblocker

waiting for a quick simple straight forward tool on github that takes care of this... Anyone?

https://github.com/pbatard/rufus/releases

https://unetbootin.github.io/#distros

> Easy workaround for this

Wipe Windows from your machine. Use Arch Linux. Problem solved.

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

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

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.

I've been using Ubuntu since around the time you needed an invite to create a Gmail account. Back then it was a breath of fresh air, because the install was batteries-included and Canonical's help forums were genuinely useful.

Ubuntu is bloated now but still just about OK despite:

* Snooping on users. * Forcing people to install Snaps. * Relentlessly promoting systemd, which turned out to be a giant mistake. * Pointless fiddling about with the desktop in every release. * Canonical having a universe-class egomaniac for a CEO, even by South African tech-billionaire standards.

But if Ubuntu has been treading water for 25 years, that represents an improvement over the titanic disaster that is Windows 11, and the walled-garden den of developer hostility that is Apple.

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?

I would have paid $19.99USD for this. For serious.

Seems like an obvious fundraising avenue (for Ubuntu Foundation).

Bootable media isn't that difficult. You need the right tool. Not sure what's current on Windows; I used Etchdroid recently. And you need a spare USB drive. That's the most annoying part. And you need to download the OS. And then you use the tool to put the OS on the drive.

I find that Rufus (https://rufus.ie/en/) is excellent for writing USB disks. I believe it's Windows/DOS only, but even as a Linux user for several decades, I boot into Windows just to run it if I need to burn an installer.

On Linux if you're comfortable with the command line use "sudo dd"

I've tried that previously (or sudo dcfldd to give better feedback), but it doesn't always seem to work for ISOs. Ironically, I've had issues writing Linux ISOs onto a USB stick under Linux, so nowadays I just use Rufus which has never failed me.

I've installed a few SBCs and they don't tend to have an issue booting, so I do use dd/dcfldd for those. I wonder if it's because they use SD cards that they don't have an issue.

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.

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