Windows 11

The overhead of Widgets and Teams in Windows 11

When you sign into an unmodified Windows 11 installation, you may notice the side-by-side icons for the Chat app (basically an entry point for the consumer version of Teams — the one with the white T icon) and Widgets.

But what is more interesting to me is the overhead of those. Without doing anything, you can sign in and launch Process Explorer to see nine processes tied to Chat/Teams:

So what is “msedgewebview2.exe”? That’s effectively the Microsoft Edge flavor of Electron. While WebView2 is supposed to be more efficient than Electron (read the Electron team’s take), it still has some obvious overhead, both in process count and memory impact.

When I first noticed these msegewebview2.exe processes, there were actually twice as many of them running in Windows 11. So where did those other six come from? From the Widgets feature. If you click on the Widgets icon once, they will be launched:

So at least those are “deferred” in that they don’t launch until you click the icon.

Let’s say that you hide both the Chat and Widgets icons. Does that get rid of all of those processes? Well, it certainly prevents the Widgets set from being created, but does it keep the Teams client and its set from launching? Yes, as a matter of fact it does (at least after you log out and back in again after turning off those icons).

So there’s another reason to consider turning those icons off: saving system resources.

Categories: Windows 11

Tagged as: , , , , ,

5 replies »

  1. My experience in Win11, with Teams and Widgets removed from the taskbar from Day 1 (and so never clicked), is that Widgets.exe and its child processes were there, if not all the time then some of the time (I can’t really recall how frequently or under what conditions they appeared). Maybe there’s another trigger.

    In any case, since disabling Widgets in group policy (and rebooting for it to take effect), I’ve not seen the above appear in memory.

    Like

  2. Is there a way to uninstall the Teams Personnal, has of now i only make it disabled on the taskbar.

    De : Out of Office Hours
    Envoyé : 30 January 2022 03:10
    À : Eric Davignon
    Objet : [New post] The overhead of Widgets and Teams in Windows 11

    Cascades – External Email

    Michael Niehaus posted: ” When you sign into an unmodified Windows 11 installation, you may notice the side-by-side icons for the Chat app (basically an entry point for the consumer version of Teams — the one with the white T icon) and Widgets. But what is more interestin”

    Like

  3. Right-click it in Start and choose Uninstall.

    But it will return unless:

    reg add HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Communications /v ConfigureChatAutoInstall /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

    You’ll need to take ownership of the “Communications” registry key first and grant yourself the relevant permissions prior to adding the above value.

    Like