Windows 11’s next big priority: Making 8GB PCs less painful to use

In March, Microsoft and Davuluri committed to major improvements within Windows, improving speed, stability, and control; redoing the Start menu and the Taskbar to include more flexibility; and giving users more control over Windows updates. Microsoft also promised to scale back Copilot, which it did by reducing the ubiquity of Copilot in Microsoft’s native apps. Since then, Microsoft has made changes to the Windows Insider program, previewed changes to the Taskbar and Start menu, quieted the Windows widgets, and made changes to File Explorer as well.

Streamlining Windows’ memory consumption has bubbled up to become a key priority, especially as rivals like Apple have launched optimized Macs (aka the MacBook Neo) with 8GB of RAM that showed off Apple’s tight integration between its operating system and its internally designed silicon. The Windows world has been able to respond with 8GB versions of the Surface Laptop and other PCs, but historically the limitations that has placed on performance and tab management has made a PC with 8GB of RAM a liability, rather than a positive.

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Microsoft hopes to change all that. For one, there’s there’s the WinUI 3 framework which governs many of the elements within Windows. Chris Anderson, a developer on Microsoft’s WinUI team, recently identified WinUI 3 as a key area for development, which Davuluri echoed.

“We’ve steadily been introducing several improvements to the memory efficiency of Windows, from taking advantage of a more efficient memory allocator to reduce overhead across apps and components, continued tuning of WinUI 3 so that apps built on it use less memory by design, as well as driving efficiencies across Chromium and Webview2 components when they appear in the operating system,” Davuluri wrote on a post on X.

The focus for the the end of the year

According to Davuluri, that process will continue through the end of 2026. “We’re going to take everything we’ve learned since March and keep listening and closing the loop on your feedback,” he wrote. “The signal from you is clear: keep going. We intend to.”

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In his own words, here’s what Davuluri identified as the priorities for Windows through the end of the year.