Style behavior difference between WebKit and Gecko

I was working on a web application when I noticed some peculiar behavior. I have an element with styles applied via the JavaScript style property. Afterwards, I tried to remove all of the styles applied on the element with removeAttribute("style"). This only works on Gecko. WebKit does nothing.

I have discovered a workaround (usi开发者_JS百科ng setAttribute("style", "") before removing the attribute) but I don't understand why the setAttribute would be needed on WebKit but not Gecko. Why?

I have an example of the behavior here. Try commenting out the setAttribute line and see how the behavior differs between Gecko and WebKit.

Could it depend on how you set the attribute?

var test=document.getElementById("test");
//test.style.background="green";
test.setAttribute("style", "background: green");
test.removeAttribute("style");

I comment out the second line, because it is a different way of changing that particular attribute.

Now the fourth line works correctly in webkit (using google chrome dev channel), and when I comment it out, //test.removeAttribute("style"), the box remains green from the third line.