Hiding the Teams icon in Windows 11 not only saves space on the taskbar, it also saves RAM

Many applications that you install on your computer have a setting that tells them to launch on first login, to save you the hassle of launching the most frequently used applications yourself. If you leave this setting enabled, apps can also check for updates or start faster when you launch them for the first time. The difference between some of the pre-installed Microsoft apps in Windows 10 and 11 is that they use some of these resources by default, whether you actually use those apps or not.

Developer and IT admin Michael Niehaus drew attention to some of these apps in recent blog posts investigating the resource usage of Windows 11, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Edge widgets on a fresh install of Windows 11 (Edge’s observations apply to Windows 10 as well).

Both widgets and Teams spawn a number of Microsoft Edge WebView2 processes to work with – WebView2 is a way to use Edge and its rendering engine without running Edge or using its UI. Together, these processes use several hundred megabytes of memory to run.

Widget-related processes do not start until you click the widgets button, although they remain in the background after that, even if you are not actively viewing your widgets. But all Teams processes start automatically, whether you’re actually using Teams or not. Removing Teams will prevent this, but Niehaus notes that simply removing the Teams icon from the Windows 11 taskbar in the taskbar settings is enough to keep those WebView2 processes from starting at login.

Microsoft Edge itself includes a feature called Startup Boost that launches Edge in the background when you sign in to save you time when you launch your first Edge window. If you’re using Edge as your default browser, this setting is worth keeping as it also only uses a couple of hundred megabytes of memory. But if you’re only using Edge as a bootloader for Chrome or Firefox, disabling System Boost in Edge’s settings will ease the load on your computer a bit.