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Comment by wolframhempel | Hacker News Reader

That's fair, but I assume that is the initial implementation. Surely, over time, browser vendors will want to make the full spectrum of select functionality available consistently.

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I don't think browsers will ever let web code affect things outside the viewport because scammers would cook up some truly zany things with that power.

Even rendering arbitrary pixels inside the viewport is bad enough. Something that went out of fashion but is apparently now back in fashion is detecting the user's operating system and browser, then displaying a pixel-perfect replica of a second browser window open to Paypal and asking you to log in... displayed within the bounds of the first browser window.

This is why the new login prompt of 1Password is worse than the old one, it appears at the center of the screen where the website could easily put a replica. The old one opened at the height of the extension icon, a bit above where the browser opens the alert dialog

Definitely not. Why would they let web devs render outside of the browser window? That's a recipe for disaster.

There needs to be some middle ground. I'd trade off just being able to set just the background color and font and keep these native-like features

If that's all your changing, then why can't you make do with the system default?

The following works for me in Chrome, and doesn't prevent the menu from going outside of the viewport:

    select, option {
        background: red;
        font-family: 'comic sans ms';
    }

Yeah, it only works in Chrome

I think that you can compose arbitrary images that way using an image-like font (using various Unicode chars and assigning to each a small tile of the full image)

Actually I am now curious of how much detail/size/colours/animations you can fit in a single letter.

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