A friend of mine worked for Google when that was introduced and said it was purely a rendering speed optimization. Someone did some tests and found the page po

A friend of mine worked for Google when that was introduced and said it was purely a rendering speed optimization. Someone did some tests and found the page pops a little faster if you leave out those closing tags. I can't seem to find any articles on it but it seems more reasonable than trying to save a couple bytes, given the other markup that's been mentioned here.