Is selectedOptions broken or…?

Answer 1

It seems that the problem is a bit deeper than a simple bug. The fact that both WebKit and Presto failed to support selectedOptions correctly gives us the hint that it depends on the fact that the property is supposed to be a HTMLCollection.

Now, HTMLCollections have their live behaviour because they're invalidated by the rendering engine when something happens to the DOM (the change of a class, the removal of a node and so on). But the selected property of an option does not trigger the invalidation of the collection, thus making it completely unreliable.

I guess the problem here is to make a new way live collections are invalidated, and it may be not very simple since it may affect the whole way the DOM is interpreted and handled.

At the present time, Chrome 21.0.1180.4 has the property removed.