what does this mean ? image/png;base64?

It's an inlined image (png), encoded in base64. It can make a page faster: the browser doesn't have to query the server for the image data separately, saving a round trip.

(It can also make it slower if abused: these resources are not cached, so the bytes are included in each page load.)

That data:image/png;base64 URL is cool, I’ve never run into it before. The long encrypted link is the actual image, i.e. no image call to the server. See RFC 2397 for details.

Side note: I have had trouble getting larger base64 images to render on IE8. I believe IE8 has a 32K limit that can be problematic for larger files. See this other StackOverflow thread for details.

That is, you are referencing an image, but instead of providing an external url, the png image data is in the url itself, embedded in the style sheet. data:image/png;base64 tells the browser that the data is inline, is a png image and is in this case base64 encoded. The encoding is needed because png images can contain bytes that are invalid inside a HTML document (or within the HTTP protocol even).