&gt; I don&#x27;t see why one computer (or one small group of computers) should be responsible for doing work that could easily be performed in a more distributed way by people&#x27;s browsers, if only because it&#x27;s cheaper to offload that work onto the client and leaves less ways to crash the server-side application.<p>Of course, this has always already been the case! That&#x27;s why we don&#x27;t stream our webpages as images (or video, if you need to scroll), but instead offload the work of rendering a graphical representation of the symbolic HTML representation to the client-side browser.<p>It&#x27;s a pretty solid idea (apart from the Browser Wars), and one of the ideas that made the WWW viable.<p>The ridiculous part, however, is where people somehow decide that we should wrap more and more and yet <i>another</i> layer of abstraction onto it.<p>It&#x27;s not that web servers have grown less powerful and therefore need to offload more work onto their clients. The demands on web servers are higher today, but they&#x27;ve also grown <i>more</i> powerful, and we came up with some pretty clever scaling technologies to deal with those higher demands. But offloading code execution in the form of client-side JS is not really one of those, in practice.<p>Yes, the idea could technically be used to accomplish that and make less work on the server side, but really, take a look at this page, or any (bloated) page like the problem we&#x27;re describing; That&#x27;s not what&#x27;s going on here, it&#x27;s about the same amount of work on the server side, nothing&#x27;s being offloaded, just more work on the client side.<p>At least the Flash-only-interface websites that plagued the web 10 years ago offered us UI elements that weren&#x27;t possible in HTML back then (for better or worse), but today&#x27;s JS bloat truly doesn&#x27;t add anything that can&#x27;t be done in a much leaner, less client resource-intensive way.<p>Even your spreadsheet example. Sure, run the calculations client-side, that only makes sense, no need to throw out JS with the bathwater. But what sort of calculations are we talking about, realistically? For a medium spreadsheet, a few hundreds of summations and multiplications. Nothing of the kind that should make a 5-year old computer even <i>blink</i>. But whatever these types of apps are actually <i>doing</i> they manage to crawl the jankscroll already even on an empty document, let alone when you try to use it.