Updated, related discussion in MicrosoftEdge Feedback repo. The source code repo with examples of each WebView-based app mentioned here is now available, too.
Let's compare the working sets of various WebView-based Windows Desktop apps. Each application simply loads the Bing homepage.
| App | Working set size |
|---|---|
| Legacy IE11 WebBrowser WPF | 164 MB |
| MSEdge WebView2 WPF | 582 MB |
| Chromely/CefSharp | 516 MB |
| Electron v10 | 570 MB |
A screenshot of Process Explorer:
Updated on 2021/05/27: Prompted by this Twitter thread, I've re-verified the WPF + WebView2 memory footprint with now-GA WebView2 Runtime (v90.0.818.66), Microsoft.Web.WebView2 (v1.0.818.41) and .NET 5 (v5.0.6).
I witness an amazing improvement, ~270MB now vs ~580MB I saw back in August 2020 when WebView2 was in preview:
The source code is here. Well done @MSEdgeDev team!