I’m definitely not the first to report this but it bears repeating: Internet Explorer has a limit. A strange limit. The browser refuses to load more than 31 style sheets. Yup, it’s true…
as posted here, and here, and here… Heck, let me just Google this for you!
Now some keen developer might ask something like: “Why are you loading more than 31 style sheets?” To which I respond: “When you’re developing for a platform like Drupal, with lot of modules loaded, each loading their own special style sheets, you kind of want all of those style sheets to be loaded separately to aid with debugging.” Later, you can just switch on compression which will automagically distill all (or most) of those CSS files into one big optimized style sheet.
Now I’ve got to say that this whole situation makes no sense. So much no sense that it’s hard to believe it’s true. In fact, while debugging I had noticed that by turning off certain stylesheets things started looking good again, and started (just started) to think that maybe, just maybe, there was some bizarre maximum file limitation imposed by IE. BAH! What kind of a crazed coder would do such a thing?? Like any smart person, I shrugged the crazies off and investigated parsing errors instead. I diligently ran every file through the W3C CSS validator and commented out all of the “problem” blocks–a process that in itself is silly just because we continue to have to add crazy amounts of vendor-specific (aka “non standards compliant”) css just to accomplish anything neat (yup, thanks again Microsoft).
Eventually (like 4 hours later) I decided to finally look into the file limit idea. And that’s when I found it: confirmation that IE9 is still a crappy Web development tool. And that’s why the Number One Web development browser at Mixtur continues to remain Mozilla Firefox with Firebug. I’m convinced that Modern Web development would most certainly grind to a halt without this suite. Yup, even Google Chrome has can’t match that combination.
So to any other developers out there: try to file this little tidbit away because one day you are going to stumble across this very problem. Better yet, add it to your ever-growing list of “Stupid browser bugs” document in Evernote.