RERecursing·May 6, 2025
See also beasties ( https://github.com/danielroe/beasties ) formerly critters ( https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/critters ) which can be used to do this during SSR/SSG and is built into Nuxt and NextJS
In Critical CSSGoogleChromeLabs
critters
JavaScript2022–2025
GoogleChromeLabs / critters · Archived
critters
🦔 A Webpack plugin to inline your critical CSS and lazy-load the rest.
4Distinct people
4Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
🦔 A Webpack plugin to inline your critical CSS and lazy-load the rest.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year4 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2022-09-10 09:21:00 UTC to 2025-05-06 19:54:53 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesI'm interested in the notion of identifying "critical" CSS that should be inlined rather than live in its own stylesheet.
I was hoping there was some principled way of identifying critical and non-critical CSS (e.g. user interaction effects like :hover would always be considered non-critical), but it looks like the library it's using just tries to render your page and do a best-effort detection on which rules are considered critical, which IMO is a little unsatisfying: https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/critters
In Show HN: Jampack – Optimizes static websites as a post-processing stephttps://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/critters Might be a good starting point. It’s designed to inline the css afterward so it’s more focused on extracting used css than removing unused.
In Optimize CSS with SAT SolvingI find critters[0] quite easy to work with and well worth implementing on my nextjs or Astro projects.
I build a lot of landing pages so there are very few multi page visits.
[0] https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/critters
In Critical CSS? Not So Fast