Question

Why doesn’t this work in IE8 to deselect all options in a multiline selectbox?

$("#myselect").children().removeAttr("selected");

Is there a workaround? Nothing I could think of (attr(“selected”,””) etc) seems to work.

UPDATE: Here is an updated jsFiddle. I have at least got it to degrade so that in IE8 the first option is selected. But without the hardcoded selected=’selected’ and the .attr call that IE8 seems to need, it does 3 different things in Firefox, Chrome and IE8! See this version:, which is simple and seems like it should work:

• in Firefox: nothing selected
• in Chrome: 0th option selected
• in IE8: 1st option selected

Maybe I have made myself crazy and there is a mistake in there somewhere I can’t see?

Answer 1

It’s something in the way jQuery translates to IE8, not necessarily the browser itself.

I was able to work around by going old school and breaking out of jQuery for one line:

document.getElementById('myselect').selectedIndex = -1;