Weiqi Gao complains that combo boxes are lame because you can’t type in them. He gives a good example of the state abbrevation MO for Missouri; in a typical drop-down list of US states, you need to go through seven M’s to get there.

Don’t blame the combobox for this guys; blame Microsoft. In their infinite wisdom, they decided not to allow the combobox control used in IE to support this behaviour. You see it everywhere throughout the rest of Windows, but not in IE pages (though you do see it in the address bar).

Every other browser picked up the same behaviour. (It turns out that recent builds of FireFox do it right, now)

(And yes, I know Netscape was around before IE, and Mosaic before that; but they didn’t support it because the windowing kits didn’t. Windows, however, does)

Weiqi Gao is right: not being able to type into comboboxes is really really lame. But don’t blame the guy who authored the page; the fault lies back with the browser authors instead.