Microsoft had previously promised to optimize Windows 11 performance and memory usage. Users have seen recent changes, and now Microsoft is fully committed to major improvements: native Windows 11 apps are making a comeback, putting an end to the previous poor memory management.
Microsoft recently confirmed that mainline WinUI development is now taking place on GitHub. WinUI engineers and other Microsoft developers are creating branches, opening pull requests, reviewing, validating, and merging changes within this repository.
Microsoft states that they have moved their daily engineering development work to public platforms like GitHub. Developers can now follow progress in real time, rather than passively waiting for notifications as before.
Microsoft made this promise at its Build conference in June, and is now delivering on it by bringing native applications back to the Windows system, aiming to create 100% native apps.
Microsoft has clearly established the WinUI framework as the core of the Windows 11 user experience, offering a more unified design style, stronger performance, and a smoother overall experience.
A major reason users previously complained about the poor experience on Windows 11 was that many running programs were not natively developed for the OS, but were instead web-based apps built using the WebView2 framework. This led to high resource consumption; for example, the much-criticized Weather app could easily consume over 1GB of memory.
Microsoft's current shift is to stop developing poorly performing apps based on WebView2 and instead use the WinUI framework to create truly native Windows 11 applications. This will result in smoother performance and help reduce memory usage, which is important as many upcoming Windows 11 PCs are expected to ship with 8GB of RAM.