I wasted a day on CSS selector performance to make a website load 2ms faster

Being the co-author of Every Layout and a super fan of wildcard selectors, as you can imagine, my mentions and DMs have been riddled with “wildcards are incredibly inefficient” for years. I of course brush that off because as Trys says in their article, browsers are very efficient at handling CSS selectors.

When this article landed in my RSS reader, I thought “Trys knows better than to waste time on this!” and not to create any spoilers, but not only does Trys demonstrate they do know better (after wasting a day lol), they also demonstrate what a red herring chasing CSS selector performance can be and how browser tools can be rather misleading. Minimal gains for lots of effort.

I tell you what is inefficient that should consume your refactor time though: JavaScript bundles.

Still, enjoy Trys’ run-down and hopefully, it might reprioritise some stuff for ya.

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