Microsoft launched a revamped Windows Copilot developed entirely native to Windows 10 and 11. The downside is that Copilot now consumes up to 1 GB of RAM.
Microsoft has a Christmas present for Windows 10 and 11 users. The revamped Windows Copilot app is now available through the Microsoft Web store. Microsoft released a test version to Windows Insiders two weeks ago and is now rolling out the app to the general public.
The new Windows Copilot introduces a quick view window, which can be accessed with the hotkey combination Alt + Space. The Copilot key can perform the same function. In quick view, you can chat with Copilot without having to open the application. The icon in the upper left corner takes you to the full version.
Same but different
The most significant change, according to Microsoft, has been made behind the scenes. Windows Copilot now no longer runs as a progressive Web application (PWA) from Microsoft Edge, but is a native application for Windows. Copilot gets an icon in the system tray on the right side of the taskbar.
Windows Latest questions the claim that Copilot is “native. The app is still heavily Web-based because it loads copilot.microsoft.com into a Microsoft Edge-based WebView. The app’s shell was developed with WinAppSDK and WinUI. The PWA version of Copilot has been replaced with a native Windows container that includes WebView.
Greedy with RAM
In practice, this does not change much in how exactly Windows Copilot works, although Windows Latest seems to have discovered a downside to the revamped way of working. The AI assistant requires more RAM than its predecessor because a new instance of Edge WebView must be run when Copilot is launched. Windows Latest measures average RAM consumption between 500 and 600 MB, with peaks of up to 1 GB.
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Microsoft launched Copilot for Windows in the fall of 2023, and since then the application has undergone several transformations. The first two versions were completely Web-based and a quasi-exact copy of then Bing Chat and ChatGPT. Step by step, Windows Copilot gained its own identity and gradually tore itself away from Edge. Rather unexpectedly, Windows Copilot also made the jump to Windows 10.