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.