Customizable Select

Description

The Customizable Select feature will allow developers to provide custom styled dropdown menus in a way that takes advantage of native browser accessibility features such as keyboard interaction.

Currently, it is common practice to create entirely custom JavaScript-driven alternatives to the native <select> element when significant custom styling of a dropdown menu is needed, which often leads to accessibility problems and other issues. The Customizable Select feature will address this.

Specification

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/form-elements.html#the-select-element

web-feature

https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/features/customizable-select/

Test Links

HTML > semantics > forms > the select element > customizable select

Additional Signals

Standards Positions

• Mozilla: Positive
• WebKit: Positive

Current State of the Feature

• Shipped in Chrome and Edge as of April 2025
• Supported in Safari 27 - Technology Preview

Browser Bugs

• Mozilla: [META] Implement customizable select element

Developer Surveys

This comment from last year's proposal describes the relevant results from the 2025 State of HTML preliminary results:

Reporting from the preliminary State of HTML 2025 results here! 🙋🏽‍♀️
Customizable Select dominated the survey:

• 398 freeform pain points about it across the survey, by far the highest of any other concrete feature (the 2nd most frequently mentioned feature had 133)
• 2nd limited availability survey feature (and 4th overall) by positive sentiment. The rank is the same, regardless of whether we look at the absolute number of positive sentiment votes (2,572 positive sentiment votes across the three usage categories) or the percentage of positive sentiment votes over total votes (2,572/6,037 = 42.6%)

Other Developer Sentiment

• 2025 Interop focus area proposal (closed, not selected)

Start with the linked HTML specification section and the web-platform-tests html/semantics/forms/the-select-element/customizable-select directory. This issue does not name a repository file, test case, or acceptance criteria, so first determine the required Interop scope from those references; completion criteria are not specified here.