Internet Explorer limits number of external CSS files to 32
Do you know IE has a limit of 32 external CSS files? Do you know each file should be up to 288Kb to get parsed?
I didn’t know and found this just a little bit of time ago. As Google says IE has a bug (well, someone names this a limitation which makes sense): number of external CSS files you can import is 32, everything beyond the 32th file will be ignored. In addition to this - CSS file size cannot exceed 288Kb, otherwise it will be ignored as well. This limit is present in Internet Explorer 6/7 and 8.
Seems IE is the only browser with such a limit, other browsers worked well for me with 33 external style sheets (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Google Chrome, Konqueror).
Solution: aggregate multiple CSS files in bigger ones. As my experience shows - most files are 5-20Kb in size, and one 40Kb file is faster than 8×5Kb.
The limit is not the file size but the number of selectors IE (including version
will parse per file. It’s 4096.
Thank you Konstantin, that’s interesting, will investigate
More information on this:
http://www.thecssdiv.co.uk/2008/09/29/new-css-for-ie6-kinda/