Update November 2022 Container Queries are now available in stable browser versions! 🎉🎉🎉🎉

✅ 2022 October 2

Edge 106 ships with Container Query support.

✅ 2022 September 22

Chrome 106 ships with Container Query support.

✅ 2022 September 11

Safari 16 ships with Container Query support.

Container Queries are an often requested feature of the web platform. It has become almost cliché to mention it when talking about problems we’d like the web platform to solve. Container Queries would go a long way toward helping web developers do their jobs better and its omission is a huge limitation when developing component-based code for the web.

Everyone wants it, but it sure seems like no one is actively working on it. But I’m not here to soapbox about that. Here I only mean to discover the earliest mention of Container Queries (or Element Queries or any implementations of this similar idea) to learn how long this feature has been requested by web developers. I’m curious: is this length of time customary for a new feature of the web platform? Or is something else going on?

Here are the earliest mentions of Container Queries that the community was able to dig up (in reverse chronological order):

2021 March 26

Chrome Canary adds an experimental flag for a container queries implementation!

• via Una Kravets

2014 December 8

Tommy Hodgins’ eqcss

• via Mattia Astorino

2013 April 1

Ian Storm Taylor’s Media Queries are a Hack blog post

• via Patrick Fulton

2013 March 17

Joe Critch’s container-queries

• via Tommy Hodgins

2013 March 8

Michael Rawlings’ containerqueries

2013 February 7

Jon Neal’s (now ⛔️ deleted) Thoughts on Media Queries for Elements

• via Jay Hoffman

2013 February 7

Nicolas Gallagher’s (now ⛔️ deleted) tweet

• via Eric Portis and Jay Hoffman

2012 April 21

Jon Neal’s MediaClass

2012 January 23

Paul Irish’s tweet reply to a (now ⛔️ deleted) Ian Storm Taylor tweet (date unknown)

2011 September 1

A question posted by user Damon on Stack Overflow

• via Jay Hoffman

2011 July 15

Andy Hume’s (now ⛔️ deleted) Responsive Containers blog post

• via Eric Portis’ Contain Your Excitement talk

2011 July 14

Andy Hume’s selector-queries

Andy Hume’s work, thus far, seems to be the original! If you have others that pre-date 2014 (even if they aren’t before Andy’s), please reply to this tweet.

Look at all this link rot! We’re so lucky that many of these entries were preserved by The Wayback Machine. You too can donate to the Internet Archive to support their obviously valuable mission.

The Container Queries idea was planted 12.8 years ago

For comparison, Ethan Marcotte’s original A List Apart article on Responsive Web Design was published 13.9 years ago on May 25, 2010.

The first large-scale Responsive Web Design project at the Boston Globe was launched after container queries were planted 12.6 years ago on September 9, 2011. The Boston Globe launch further planted the seeds for responsive image approaches that would result in web browser implementations of both <img srcset> and <picture> just three years later in 2014.

In conclusion, 🤷‍♂️.