In an episode of Microsoft’s Inside Windows podcast spotted by Windows Latest, a Surface Pro owner asked if Microsoft would improve memory consumption, since they had to disable on-device AI services just to run a local model.

“I do think memory is top of mind for us right now in the industry, especially as we look at the rising cost of memory for computers across the board,” said Davuluri. “For us, as a Windows team, we have clear efforts around driving better utilization of memory.”

Davuluri said this in May, and on July 31, Microsoft made it official, listing “Memory optimization for 8GB and above” as one of its new Windows focus areas.

Saying RAM is expensive is a huge understatement, but the effect is that OEMs are bringing 8GB laptops back, and hopefully, Windows 11 won’t choke on it.

Microsoft says Windows 11 itself needs to get better at using RAM

Davuluri wasn’t promising a RAM cleaner app. He described work at every layer, from the memory manager inside Windows to the “efficiency of frameworks that live on top of Windows,” so both apps and the OS use less memory.

“We do definitely have work when it comes to compressing memory and making sure we’re more efficient on the platform,” he said.

Marcus Ash, CVP of Design and Research, added that teams like Widgets and File Explorer are taking a scenario-based approach. “They’re really trying to figure out for a given scenario, how do I improve memory efficiencies.”

Davuluri followed up, saying: “You only take the memory cost as and when you use the capability. Otherwise, the base system gets a little bit more efficient across the board.”

So, Microsoft isn’t trying to make every part of Windows tiny. Optional features, including AI, should only eat RAM when you use them, while the base OS gets lighter. Davuluri also promised “better choice and end user control around AI,” which is good news for that Surface Pro owner, and the rest of us!

Later in the podcast, Davuluri said Microsoft is modernizing Windows with WinUI 3, starting with Run and common File Explorer dialogs. WinUI itself just got basic controls and a memory fix, and in July, Microsoft said it is tuning WinUI 3 “so that apps built on it use less memory by design.”

Microsoft helped create the RAM problem before putting Windows on a diet

For years, the answer to a slow Windows PC was simple: Buy more RAM.

Windows 11 still needs just 4GB (minimum requirement, that is), but Microsoft made 16GB the baseline for Copilot+ PCs, all while adding more and more web-based UI elements and making first-party web apps, having no regard for RAM usage.

Then memory prices exploded, and Microsoft started selling an 8GB Surface Laptop for $1,299, calling 8GB fine for everyday use, and even deleted its 32GB RAM recommendation from its docs.

OEMs followed, with 8GB Windows 11 laptops, including Lenovo’s MacBook Neo rival.

On the flip side, Microsoft also built a special Windows 11 for power users that needs 64GB of RAM.

The AI boom made memory more expensive

Microsoft partnered with OpenAI in 2019 with a $1 billion investment, expanded it with a multibillion-dollar deal in 2023, and in January 2025 said it expected to spend about $80 billion that fiscal year on AI-enabled datacenters.

Meanwhile, memory makers shifted fab capacity toward High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and server-grade DRAM to feed AI datacenters. According to TrendForce’s latest memory industry report, conventional DRAM contract prices climbed throughout 2026 as suppliers prioritized advanced nodes for high-performance servers, with prices rising another 10% to 15% quarter-over-quarter in Q4.

While enterprise server demand absorbed the lion’s share of production, it was us who felt the direct squeeze, as consumer PC memory module costs were pushed up, forcing PC makers to reconsider base configuration specs.

To be clear, Microsoft didn’t single-handedly cause RAM prices to explode. But it was at the front of the AI spending wave that changed the economics of memory, and now, the Windows team has to make the OS lighter because memory got too expensive. This is textbook irony.

Why Windows 11 uses so much RAM, and what Microsoft is doing about it

When you see users complaining about Windows 11’s RAM usage, there is usually a misunderstanding about how Windows manages memory. The OS operates on the principle that idle RAM is wasted RAM, so the Windows Memory Manager and the SysMain service aggressively prefetch frequently launched apps into the Standby cache.

Note that this cached data doesn’t reduce your available headroom, and as soon as an active workload needs memory, Windows instantly discards or repurposes those standby pages without a performance drop.

But what I don’t accept is unnecessary RAM wastage due to poor app and OS optimization, and you might’ve guessed it already: I am indeed talking about web apps and web-based UI elements in Windows 11.

WebView2 is the Chromium-based engine behind many Windows features and Microsoft’s apps. Every WebView2 instance is a small browser instance.

In its July update, Microsoft said it has moved to “a more efficient memory allocator to reduce overhead across apps and components,” and is “driving efficiencies across Chromium and Webview2 components when they appear in the operating system.”

Most of this work is still in Insider builds, though features like CPU boost already made a 10-year-old PC feel surprisingly new in our testing. Microsoft also promised faster boot and better 8GB performance without sharing any numbers.

Microsoft’s apps are a big part of the problem. Teams famously eats RAM while doing nothing, and Microsoft’s answer has been an efficiency mode, not a native app. Third-party apps using Electron and web components aren’t any better, with WhatsApp eating 1.2GB and Discord’s Electron app acting as one of Windows 11’s biggest RAM offenders.

In my opinion, Microsoft should move its first-party apps, starting with Teams and maybe something trivial like Weather, to WinUI 3. A Windows experience like Weather shouldn’t need a browser engine, and Microsoft can’t ask developers to go native while its own apps use WebView2, especially after it told developers to build Electron AI apps earlier this year.

For years, the fix for a memory-hungry PC was buying more RAM, which worked while RAM was cheap. Now Microsoft is trying to fix it from the memory manager all the way up to WinUI. Microsoft made Windows comfortable with using more memory, and now that memory is expensive, the software giant has to make Windows comfortable with using less.

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The update is Windows App SDK 2.5 Experimental, released on September 29, and it finally adds WinUI 3 TableView and Chart controls. More importantly, it includes fixes for WinUI memory growth.

If you remember, Microsoft confirmed at the Build 2026 developer conference that WinUI is Windows 11’s flagship native framework, and it’s going to catch up eventually in all areas.

It also admitted that WinUI is still a mess in some areas, and there’s a framework gap where other frameworks, even though they’re not native, have more features than WinUI.

For example, until now, you couldn’t build a WinUI app that supports TableView and Chart controls using Microsoft’s own native controls. It might not sound like a big deal unless you realize how many apps could actually use these controls

WinUI did support some of these controls through community-made efforts, but these basic features have been missing from Microsoft directly. You can’t expect a “flagship” framework to not even natively support charts, right?

Until now, quite a lot of users, and even developers, believed that Microsoft’s promises to make WinUI better were just “words,” as it’s not the first time the company committed to a framework and later abandoned it.

In fact, WinUI was a part of a big push during the early days of Windows 11, but at some point, it started looking like the framework was dead, and even Microsoft moved some of its own apps to the web.

You’ve got apps like MSN Weather or even the Start menu using web components, and its flagship products, such as Outlook and Teams, are web crap.

Microsoft is shipping the WinUI controls it promised at Build

At Build 2026, Chris Anderson from Microsoft’s Windows UI team shared the following statement:

“We have DataGrid and Charting that are up and coming that should be out relatively shortly,” Anderson said during the session. “These will be showing up in the core WinUI bits and will allow you to go after a lot more of these data-oriented scenarios.”

With Windows App SDK 2.5 Experimental, you’re getting TableView with grouping, templated group headers, sorting and filtering with column-header sort indicators, pointer and keyboard column resizing, and optional tooltips for cells and column headers.

Moreover, WinUI Chart control support has also landed in this release, and as I noted, it’s a big deal because native Windows apps have lacked some of the most basic controls enterprise developers expect out of the box. It pushed developers to other frameworks, such as Electron.

Microsoft also fixed WinUI memory growth issues

Windows Latest observed that the Windows App SDK update also has a critical fix that should reduce memory usage for some modern apps.

According to Microsoft, WinUI had a bug where memory usage could grow when apps repeatedly created visual-state storyboards or resolved static or theme resources.

And that reminds me that Microsoft made it clear that performance is one of the areas where WinUI lags, and it can do better.

“The first and foremost is performance, fundamentals, quality, fixing a lot of bugs,” Anderson said at the Build 2026 developer conference.

He also noted that WinUI can sometimes use more memory, but it’ll eventually get better because Microsoft has heavily invested in improving memory usage, and it’s necessary given the rising cost of RAM.

“On the performance side we’ve invested heavily in really improving memory usage as well as switching over to a system compositor which should yield some even better performance improvements,” Anderson said.

We’re finally seeing some of these improvements, but they’ve only landed in Windows App SDK Experimental, so users and developers won’t automatically receive the benefits immediately.

Microsoft previously also said that it’ll begin integrating WinUI into the Windows shell at a much faster rate after patching critical bugs, and this memory growth fix could be part of that larger push. Moreover, we’re also told that Windows will get more native apps from Microsoft, and by native, the company means “100%” native.

“We’ve started to integrate it into the shell at a much faster rate,” Anderson said. “And so you’re going to see a lot of the first-party features coming from Microsoft being built on top of WinUI.”

How bad is Windows 11’s app situation?

Most people do not realize how bad the state of Windows 11 apps is unless they look at Task Manager and pay close attention to the framework of the apps. Most popular apps either use Edge’s WebView-based web apps or Electron, and most have not even bothered to optimize their web crap, which makes the situation even worse.

In fact, as somebody who has been following Windows development for decades, I’ve watched native apps become web apps, then become native again, then get abandoned and go back to the web. For example, WhatsApp had a native UWP app, and even Microsoft’s Copilot had a WinUI app. Both were replaced with web-based versions that used considerably more RAM in our testing.

WhatsApp’s WebView2 version climbing from about 600MB to 1.2GB of RAM while scrolling through messages in our November 2025 test. Playback is sped up 2.5×. Video: Windows Latest

For those unfamiliar, Discord uses Electron, which packages Chromium and Node.js with the app. On the other hand, apps like New Outlook, Teams, WhatsApp, and MSN Weather use WebView2 to run the entire shell in a Microsoft Edge-powered container.

Here are some of your favourite apps and their framework:

Funny enough, WhatsApp is that one perfect old app that was easily running with 100 individual chats and around 30 active groups with that small idle footprint. Now, it feels like a pain to use WhatsApp on the desktop.

And it’s not just WhatsApp that abandoned its native app. The irony is that Microsoft made a similar choice with Copilot when it replaced its well-built WinUI version with a web version that shipped with its own Edge package and used more resources.

It makes you wonder why these developers are not picking up WinUI. Is WinUI bad, or is it because Microsoft doesn’t enforce its own framework enough? Well, I’d say WinUI has been ignored for all these years, and it wasn’t clear until March 2026 what Microsoft’s flagship framework for Windows 11 actually was.

Microsoft itself used different frameworks for different apps and parts of the OS. For example, the Start menu still uses React Native for its Recommended feed and All apps list.

WinUI is not close to perfect, and that’s why we’re seeing these memory-related fixes or basic features finally getting added. But when you have other alternatives like WebView or Electron, I’d go with the lesser evil, and that is WinUI.

There’s no chance Windows would go back to classic Win32 apps, which worked better, felt native, and used fewer resources than any of these frameworks. But if Microsoft wants Windows 11 apps to feel less like web pages running inside Edge, WinUI is probably the closest practical answer it has right now.

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I already have the “new” Copilot app on my PC, albeit without Home, Code, or Autopilot, because they are still not out yet. This app, however, is the replacement for the terribly named Microsoft 365 Copilot app, and you can get it too if you update it in the Microsoft Store.

Well, the thing Nadella keeps calling an OS is a regular Windows app, and when I went through the installation folder of build 154.0.4258.37, I found that copilotapp.exe is a rebranded Microsoft Edge launcher with a complete Chromium build behind it.

Microsoft is talking about a new operating system for work, but it’s actually an app on Windows 11 that runs in a browser. This is some Inception-level stuff!

Satya Nadella is calling Copilot an OS again, and Microsoft has a reason

In an October 1 post announcing that LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky will leave Microsoft at the end of 2026, Nadella wrote:

“With Copilot, we are executing rapidly against our vision to build a new OS for work that spans every model, every form factor, and every task, with Office fully embedded in Copilot and vice versa!”

From what I see, Nadella’s “OS” pitch makes sense to the company because the app is now one place where you get all your work done, and Microsoft recently merged its Copilot identities and renamed the Microsoft 365 Copilot app to just “Copilot” to get there.

Microsoft wants Copilot to become the layer above your apps

According to Microsoft’s September 25 announcement, the new Copilot brings together Home, where there is Chat and Cowork, and Office in Copilot, with Word, Excel and PowerPoint built in.

Code lets anyone build apps, dashboards and workflows by describing them in plain English, and Autopilot (previously called Scout) is a persistent agent that keeps working even when you’re not prompting it.

A proactive command center called Today is coming for your mail, calendar, Teams threads, meetings, and tasks, and apps built in Code can run on Copilot Managed Runtime inside your company’s Microsoft 365 environment.

An operating system has always been the common layer through which you reach apps, files, and services. Microsoft wants Copilot to be that common layer for work, and as a product strategy, I get it, but I don’t think most people would agree with this take.

Most of the big Copilot features aren’t in the app yet

Home and Code will roll out through the Frontier program in the coming weeks; Autopilot only entered private preview at the end of September, and Today enters private preview in October.

So, the Copilot on my PC, signed in with a work account on M365 Copilot (Basic), is just a chat window with Search, Library, Agents, and Notebooks in the sidebar. However, these new capabilities will just be added to this app, instead of the company making it from scratch using WinUI.

The Copilot app looks like Windows software, but Chromium does most of the work

Microsoft calls Copilot a desktop app along with its web and mobile versions, and from the regular user’s POV, it looks like one. But if you lift the hood, copilotapp.exe is only 4.99MB, and it imports the DLLs that the Edge browser process uses.

Next to it is a folder with a full Edge 154 build of roughly 520MB, including a 349.6MB msedge.dll that contains the whole browser, along with Chromium resource packs, V8, ICU, FFmpeg, and GPU components. Even copilotapp_proxy.exe has a file hash identical to Edge’s msedge_proxy.exe.

Copilot also carries Edge baggage like the IE mode adapter, Widevine DRM, and Edge Game Assist.

When you open Copilot, this browser loads copilot.microsoft.com for personal accounts and m365.cloud.microsoft/chat for work accounts, with Chromium’s usual renderer, GPU and utility processes running behind it. In simple words, the browser is the app, and naturally, the RAM usage is as high as it could get, even without it doing anything.

The new Copilot isn’t the WebView2 wrapper Microsoft shipped before

Copilot on Windows has changed its architecture more times than I can count. Microsoft once shipped a more native WinUI Copilot and built on it for a year, then started dumping native Copilot for a web wrapper in March.

In April, we found that the new Copilot included a full Edge package and rendered its UI through WebView2, using up to 500MB in the background and around 1GB when active.

The current build goes a step further. I found no CoreWebView2, WebView2Loader, CreateCoreWebView2, or Microsoft.Web.WebView2 references in the main app or its native host, and no Electron files either. Microsoft has moved from embedding the web inside a native shell to making a Chromium browser build the core of the app.

Microsoft built a native WinUI host with the Chromium core

Calling Copilot “just a website” wouldn’t be fair either, thanks to a second piece called copilotapphost.exe.

It’s a WinUI 3 app written in C# on .NET 10 and compiled with NativeAOT, and it ships with Windows App SDK and WinUI XAML libraries. Microsoft uses it for voice activation, the “Hey Copilot” wake word, the voice composer, vision consent, screen sharing, and the floating composer overlay.

However, the native UI is tiny, as the XAML in the host only covers VoiceComposer, VisionConsent, ScreenShareItem, a suggestion flyout, and the floating composer controls.

Chromium owns the main window and everything you see in it, while the WinUI host wakes up only when Copilot needs a Windows feature like the microphone or screen capture, and exits when it’s idle.

The two halves talk through a Windows named-pipe bridge, with handlers for hotkeys, voice, chat queries, settings, code permissions, and local folder access.

Interestingly, the host’s manifest matches the Microsoft 365 Copilot (Office Hub) app’s byte for byte, so one host and one Edge-based shell serve both consumer and work Copilot.

TL;DR: Copilot is a Chromium app with a small WinUI sidekick.

But Microsoft is finally making WinUI better while Copilot goes the other way

Ironically, Microsoft just shipped Windows App SDK 2.5 Experimental with TableView and Chart controls, along with a fix for WinUI’s memory growth issue.

Microsoft has spent all of 2026 talking about native Windows. It’s rewriting parts of the Windows 11 shell in native code, admitted WinUI apps hog RAM and promised a fix, and is fixing the missing basics that pushed developers to web apps in the first place.

Yet one of its most important apps on Windows is built with Chromium. Microsoft is clearly investing in WinUI, but it looks like Copilot has a different priority, which is shipping one experience across Windows, the web, Mac and mobile, and Chromium makes that much easier.

The Copilot “OS” philosophy isn’t new

Recently, we looked at leaked internal documents for Project Aion, a 2024 prototype called CopilotOS that swapped the Start menu and desktop for a Copilot web shell built on a modified Edge.

Of course, I’m not saying that the current Copilot app is Aion, but you see the resemblance too, right? While it was an actual web OS that looked like it was made for AI and Agents, the new Copilot is a web app that is being called an OS for work, again built for AI and Agents.

Nadella’s “OS” description makes sense only when you look at what Microsoft wants Copilot to become, with chat, Office, coding, and agents behind one interface. But being the layer for someone’s work and being an operating system are two different things.

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