what is the max number css rules I can specify in style sheet per browser

Question

what is the max number css rules I can specify in style sheet per browser.

Answer 1

Internet Explorer 6-9 have a few reported limits:

• Any rules after the first 4,095 are ignored
• Any stylesheets included via @import, <link> or <style>, are ignored after the first 31
• @import statements nested 4 or more levels deep are ignored

These limits are outlined in KB 262161. In IE10 these limits were significantly raised to:

• A stylesheet may contain up to 65,534 rules
• A document may use up to 4,095 stylesheets
• @import nesting no longer has its own limit

There are no such reported limits for other browsers, but in theory any of them could run into performance issues with a large number of unoptimised CSS rules.

Various sources:

http://simple.procoding.net/2009/02/20/internet-explorer-limits-number-of-external-css-files-to-32/
http://joshua.perina.com/africa/gambia/fajara/post/internet-explorer-css-file-size-limit
http://am-blog.no-ip.org/BlogEngine/post/2010/03/24/CSS-File-Size-Limit-in-Internet-Explorer-6-7-8.aspx

Answer 2

Are you talking about how many css includes you can do? IE does have a maximum of 32 (source) or maybe 31.

However it sounds like you are asking if there is a maximum amount of styles you can include in a single .css file, and I am not aware of any limit in that respect.