Styling `<select>` in Internet Explorer

Answer 1

IE is most likely in quirks mode. Previous versions of IE didn't draw the select element themselves and thus it couldn't be styled properly (as well as some z-order quirks), so on IE < 8 you simply can't do it, unless you re-implement something like select in JS. Take a look at the developer tools (F12) to see which browser and document mode IE is in; if it says "Internet Explorer 8" for the Browser mode and not "Quirks mode" for the document mode, you should be ok :)

The following snippet works fine here (IE8β2):