The FIFTH redesign for Copilot is now live on Windows 11. While it’s not really a redesign, the app or “Copilot” experience has been created from scratch for the fifth time in a row, and it looks like Microsoft has finally got it right. Copilot is now “native” on Windows 11, and no longer uses web components. It works better than the ChatGPT app.

The new Copilot (internally called “NATIVE.COPILOT), started rolling out to the testers in the Windows Insider Program this week.

It is the first true “native” AI experience on Windows 11 after Microsoft dumped the sidebar-based Copilot in favour of a web app, which was again replaced with a web wrapper, then by a Microsoft Edge-based wrapper and later by PWA.

How is the “native Copilot” different?

The new Copilot is built using modern Windows technologies like XAML and WinUI. This means the interface feels more integrated with Windows 11, so it has a proper title bar, system tray icon, and native controls that make it look and feel like a regular Windows 11 app.

The older version was a Progressive Web App (PWA) that heavily relied on Microsoft Edge’s WebView2 to load copilot.microsoft.com inside a container. This meant higher memory usage and a less seamless “native” experience.

On the other hand, the new Copilot is fully native, so it doesn’t feel slow or laggy, and it also uses less memory compared to the old version.

In our tests, Windows Latest observed that old Copilot (PWA-based) used up to 1GB of RAM on average. This happened because Copilot called up Microsoft Edge-related components, such as the background loader, push notifications, and more. It also relied more on JavaScript, which contributed to high memory usage.

On the other hand, we noticed that the new native Copilot uses 50-100MB of RAM, which is a huge difference.

I am not really surprised by these numbers. A Copilot app built using XAML and WinUI is completely native, and isn’t relying the web component, so it’s bound to use less RAM.

In addition to performance, there’s a new side panel for accessing the history and starting new conversations. It also offers picture-in-picture mode.

Another advantage is Copilot can now better understand the OS. For example, you can open Copilot and ask if it can explain how to turn off Spotlight on Windows 11’s desktop, and based on the version of the OS, it can create tailored answers.

Copilot can understand the operating system context, so it’s likely you’ll be able to use the AI to control parts of Windows 11 soon. For now, the Copilot native app isn’t deeply integrated into Windows 11 and does nothing extraordinary.

However, new Copilot is much better than the ChatGPT app, which uses Chromium Electron over native Windows framework.

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