[Lxr]

Honestly, I believe the exact opposite is true. Why should you make your users and their batteries work harder to get what they want? Somebody comes to our website with a task in their head, and fundamentally our goal is to help them complete that task as quickly as possible. "Offload as much work to the client as possible" does not help our users complete their tasks faster. It makes life easier for dev teams by having servers that focus on APIs, reusing js code to create native apps, etc. But in the vast majority of cases it does not help the user, even if done perfectly. No, it's not faster because "no whole page reload" and yes, it does break expected browser behaviour unless you are extremely, unreasonably careful. The only exception is if you're building Google Maps or something extremely "appy" and need to have an alternative to the app store, for some reason.