[gotothrowaway]

The other day I noticed that they're inlining image data in the src attribute instead of pointing at an external URL. Really taking things to the next level all-around - I wonder when that will become the norm instead of css image sprites.

[nonuby]

Hopefully never, and certainly not with http 2.0 around the corner (this adoption wont be so slow, things are already starting to fall neatly into place). It's a micro-optimization Google can afford to do, others will just rely on optimize images size and a CDN instead (possibly an extra hostname) and vast majority wont/don't even bother..