Possibly faster parsing, because the parser has less HTML so go through. (also probably not valid, because I'd be pretty sure that reading a string from memory is not the bottleneck in parsing, compared to logic, memory allocations, etc).

It could make a difference for Googles server infrastructure though.

If they have to download a tiny bit less, and save a tiny bit on CPU cycles and memory for each page, , it might still lead to considerably savings.