This is absolutely great, but I have two observations: 1. Google's embedded maps & API are significantly faster than their own maps on https://maps.google.com/

This is absolutely great, but I have two observations: 1. Google's embedded maps & API are significantly faster than their own maps on https://maps.google.com/ https://maps.google.com/. That particular team seems to have just recently fired or re-assigned every developer with any knowledge or - more likely, interest in - performance 2. I would guess the performance of the openstreetmap.org tileservers are the biggest bottleneck in your example. Their own website says "The tile service comes with no guarantee as to availability or speed", which is why alternative hosts of that dataset are so proliferate. Including a few alternative OSM tile hosts like opencyclemap, Mapbox, Mapzen, &c. could be very interesting.