v2.6.5

TaskManager+ v2.6.5 — A much lighter app, and app icons fixed in light mode

The headline here is memory. TaskManager+ used to reserve several hundred megabytes at launch for AI features you might never open in that session — it now starts at a fraction of that and loads them only when you actually reach for one. This release also fixes two slow leaks in long-running sessions, and includes the light-mode icon fix that was prepared for 2.6.2 but never shipped.

Starting up light

Previously, launching the app loaded the on-device AI models straight away: the search embedder and, on the Enhanced tier, the 379 MB writing model. Memory climbed from about 7 MB to roughly 820 MB within seven seconds of opening the app, whether or not you ever used an AI feature.

Those models now load on intent — when you open the command palette to search, or when you deliberately turn an AI tier on in Settings. A cold start now settles around 44 MB.

The first AI action in a session pays the load time that launch used to absorb. If you would rather have it ready up front, Settings → "Prewarm AI at startup" restores the old behaviour; it is off by default.

A few other paths were quietly loading the embedder as a side effect of unrelated work. Those have been closed too, so the models load when you ask for them and not before.

Leaks in long-running sessions

Two fixes that matter if you leave the app running in the tray for days rather than hours:

• Performance counter tables. The app watches GPU, network and disk activity through Windows performance counters using wildcard queries. Those queries quietly accumulate an entry for every instance they have ever seen — every GPU engine, every network interface — and never discard retired ones, so the table grows without limit inside a Windows system library. The app now rebuilds the query periodically, which drops the stale entries.
• Process detail cache. The cache holding per-application details (icons, publisher information) had no upper bound and grew with every distinct process seen over a session. It is now capped.

App icons in light mode

Every app icon — in the Processes list, in Frequent Apps, and in Startup apps — was drawn with its transparent areas filled in solid black. On the dark theme that is invisible, because black against a near-black page reads as transparent. In light mode each icon sat in an obvious black square.

The icons were being requested from Windows in a mode that flattens them against a mask instead of keeping their transparency. They now come back with their alpha channel intact and sit cleanly on either theme.

This dates back to v1.2.0 and was only ever visible to light-theme users.

Build and dependency cleanup

sharp, an image-processing library, has been removed. It was a leftover from Tauri v1 — whose command-line tool used it to generate app icons — and nothing in the app ever imported it. It carried four known vulnerabilities in the native image library it bundles. Two other build-time dependencies were updated to patched versions. None of these ever shipped inside the app, but the project now reports no known vulnerabilities.

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Full Changelog: v2.6.1...v2.6.5