yeah, i agree totally, but even better are no icons at all. i don't have exact figures by hand, but one sites (which used sprits very very heavily) we managed

yeah, i agree totally, but even better are no icons at all. i don't have exact figures by hand, but one sites (which used sprits very very heavily) we managed to save about 250ms in DOM rendering - on some slow, crappy, ugly plattforms (not talking about IE6 here, but IE7 and 8 aren't much better in that regard). i recommend using chrome speed tracer extensively for DOM rendering optimization. what is just a little bit slow in chrome is unbelievable slow on IE.