Question

In IE, the dropdown-list takes the same width as the dropbox (I hope I am making sense) whereas in Firefox the dropdown-list’s width varies according to the content.

This basically means that I have to make sure that the dropbox is wide enough to display the longest selection possible. This makes my page look very ugly 🙁

Is there any workaround for this problem?
How can I use CSS to set different widths for dropbox and the dropdownlist?

Answer 1

Here’s another jQuery based example. In contrary to all the other answers posted here, it takes all keyboard and mouse events into account, especially clicks:

if (!$.support.leadingWhitespace) { // if IE6/7/8
    $('select.wide')
        .bind('focus mouseover', function() { $(this).addClass('expand').removeClass('clicked'); })
        .bind('click', function() { $(this).toggleClass('clicked'); })
        .bind('mouseout', function() { if (!$(this).hasClass('clicked')) { $(this).removeClass('expand'); }})
        .bind('blur', function() { $(this).removeClass('expand clicked'); });
}

Use it in combination with this piece of CSS:

select {
    width: 150px; /* Or whatever width you want. */
}
select.expand {
    width: auto;
}

All you need to do is to add the class wide to the dropdown element(s) in question.

<select class="wide">
    ...
</select>

Here is a jsfiddle example.