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WhatsApp is the worst app on your Windows 11 PC right now, eating 1.2GB of RAM doing nothing
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this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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Oh it's doing plenty. Just not for you.
Anything owned by facebook is already the worst app on whatever device it's installed on.
Counterpoint: no, it's not, because I'm not stupid enough to install it.
Born in the PWA it was.
(I figure this limits what it can scrape from any OS.)
I'm not using it nor the Facebook Messenger app, but rather their messenger in the browser. Meta is an evil necessity in my country because the businesses I deal with are mostly active on Facebook, and almost all people are tethered to it, and I have to use a facade where I don't have to give Zuck anything about myself.
I'm shocked to learn that a dedicated browser always running in the background for a chat app uses 100x the memory and resources
Wouldn't Windows 11 be the worst app on your Windows 11 PC? 🤔
It's probably just teams, right?
It's all sharepoint under the hood.
Only for some file storage. The Teams app is a memory hog and hot garbage all on its own.
I was joking for sure. Most of M365 is a hodgepodge of Exchange and Sharepoint, including Teams. But that's all server side, so doesn't matter to the client. They could make a the clients not terrible even if the server is hot garbage.
bitlocker and the encrypt without permission resulting in loss of all files still takes the cake for me
windows update boot loop is a close second
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Technically.... Yes.
People using Meta's products are masochists.
"Yes, daddy, please violate my privacy even more and manipulate me into hating myself and making me addicted to your shit."
My government and employers would not move away from WhatsApp, so, short of lobbying, I am forced to remain.
Well most people dont have any other option since 100% of your friends and families are exclusively on WhatsApp , whatsapp had early mover advantage it was free and easy to use so now everyone just uses it
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Oh, it's most likely doing something. Just nothing you would want.
My Windows 11 PC? Where?
My Linux PC doesn't have WhatsApp installed. Someone tell me where this Windows 11 PC is so I can retrieve it and install Linux on that too.
Pah, only 1.2GB? How can it even move a mouse pointer or accept keyboard input?!?
What Windows 11 pc exactly? 😎
That one.
Without having read the article, lemme guess... Electron.
Maybe now that no-one can afford RAM these companies might get motivated to do something about that. Hell, I'd accept them just feeling shamed into not being the worst memory hog on your system at this point, over any altruistic reason.
See also: Discord and Slack, two other colossal wastes of space that use an order of magnitude more RAM than a native app would while running slower and providing absolutely zero other benefits.
The worst part about electron is that there is no way for it to share resources like a browser. You have to oacjage the whole version together, when really should should have been more like a pwa. Instead you have 10 electron instances, running with 10x the respurce needs.
that's why you just skip the middleman and run it in your browser instead.
my friend has 16gb of ram and he keeps hitting out-of-memory errors when he has like 5 apps open, because they’re all electron and they all take like 2gb each, it’s ridiculous
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Ew. Why not use the browser version
There is no other version. An electron app is a browser app.
You can still just open it in the browser
How will that help?
This person fundamentally misunderstands RAM on Windows...
Apps reserve a portion of the total available memory. That memory is not necessarily in use. Memory not in use will still be available to other applications as soon as the system reallocates it when a given application needs more. Usually of you have more RAM, applications will reserve more of it. You can check a better explanation of your current memory usage in the windows resource monitor. You'll see memory allocated, memory in use, and memory being used to cache data (which windows does to reduce disk reads and writes), as well as memory completely unallocated. Chrome can easily allocate 1/3 of your total available memory by the third tab, but that doesn't mean chrome is actually using that much.
No, the worst app is Windows 11. My parents have some all-in-one HP PC. It has some Intel laptop processor from about 8 years ago, 16GB of ram, (upgraded from 8), and a wheezy 256GB spinning drive, running Win10 adequately.
After being bombarded with "upgrade to Windows 11! It's easy and fun!!" notifications, they did so, and of course their PC is woefully underpowered for the job.
I log in remotely and check what's running and the OS is paging to the swap file constantly. [Edit: and I mean, to the point where opening an application takes 60 seconds of disk thrashing for a window to appear]
I had to get a de-bloat script and turn off about 50 Microsoft "essential services". The biggest hog out of them all was copilot, which was using about 4GB while sitting there idle.
I have no doubt that I'm going to have to run that script every month as everything gets "repaired", until I can get back to their place and put a SSD in and maybe install some flavour of Linux.
I had to get a de-bloat script and turn off about 50 Microsoft "essential services"
And then a Windows Update comes along...
Install Linux, Problem Solved.
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microsoft committments to ui frameworks can be gotten in bulk, for free at your nearest flea market
Why would anyone put WhatsApp on their computer?
Stop using meta people!
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I don't know who is doing the testing, but they don't know what they're doing. 313MB
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