Snort is a web client. The convenience of running a web client means the back-end server is doing some work on your behalf, connecting and posting to relays, making certain UI behaviors more efficient, etc, as browsers cannot directly participate in the protocol. 

 That's incorrect, browsers can run the protocol just fine. There are other clients without a backend. My client does not have a backend 

 It's actually very light on webserver resources. Basically you load up the client once and that's it. You can handle vast amounts of traffic on such a client at very low cost 

 My mistake, i do see lots of websocket connections to relay nodes in my browser when using iris.to, for instance. I would presume all web clients do this or at least the better performing ones? 

 So what is the true requirement of a web client - to serve up the static html/css/js and the browser does the work from there? This should be a nothing-burger unless I'm missing something. 

 Yes that's all a client needs to do. For additional services like text search you need a search server etc 

 Ah yes, makes sense. I think a web client would be well advised to install a Lookup NPUB button that does a direct GET to a profile URL. I'd imagine 80% of the traffic are lookups from Twitter npub shares.