Yeah I wonder why that isn't used... I can even remove the src from the image and add "background-color: #aad3de" and it looks exactly the same. I'd imagine it'

Yeah I wonder why that isn't used... I can even remove the src from the image and add "background-color: #aad3de" and it looks exactly the same. I'd imagine it's also slightly faster and less memory intensive to render a static background color than to copy the data from an image. I'm actually surprised they even use DOM nodes for this. Last I checked Google Maps uses a totally custom WebGL based renderer (since it supports 3D and such).