Why doesn links display background images?
Links doesn’t display background images intentionally, because background images don’t bring any extra information to the page and just degrade the text legibility. If the background images were displayed, the font cache would be unnecessarily raped which would just bring an unnecessary slowdown. During execution on a remote computer over a network the network bandwidth would be wasted spectacularly , as practically each letter would have to be transmitted again, as it would happen to have a different background (for each occurence of the letter A the whole bitmap of the letter would have to be transmitted again, as each occurence of the letter A would have a different background or the same background shifted by a different amount of pixels). This would render the browser practically unusable for remote execution.
