[ssorallen]

The lifting can be heavy for mobile devices with slow CPUs and limited battery life unlike the servers running your site. Also if your server renders the site and some of the pages are public, the server can cache the HTML and let the web server serve cached HTML rather than render the page in the web framework for each request.

[acdha]

> The lifting can be heavy for mobile devices with slow CPUs and limited battery life unlike the servers running your site.

The reverse is also frequently true: if client rendering can improve cacheability or reduce the data going over the wire the radio savings will pay for a LOT of text updates. Similarly, if you can transfer a large listing without creating thousands of DOM nodes the results can be a wash depending on exactly how much data, the browser, etc.

There isn't a single right answer here - it really depends on the application and good analysis.

[marknutter]

It doesn't have to be heavy, even for mobile devices. Decrease your dependency on large libraries, minify and cache everything, and only load what they need. Once they load it the first time and cache it then all they ever need is a bit of JSON here and there.