Remove outline from select box in FF

Well, Duopixel’s answer is plain perfect. If we go a step further we can make it bulletproof.

select:-moz-focusring {
    color: transparent;
    text-shadow: 0 0 0 #000;
}

Only valid for Firefox and the ugly dotted outline around the selected option is gone.


I found a solution, but it is mother of all hacks, hopefully it will serve as a starting point for other more robust solutions. The downside (too big in my opinion) is that any browser that doesn't support text-shadow but supports rgba (IE 9) won't render the text unless you use a library such as Modernizr (not tested, just a theory).

Firefox uses the text color to determine the color of the dotted border. So say if you do...

select {
  color: rgba(0,0,0,0);
}

Firefox will render the dotted border transparent. But of course your text will be transparent too! So we must somehow display the text. text-shadow comes to the rescue:

select {
  color: rgba(0,0,0,0);
  text-shadow: 0 0 0 #000;
}

We put a text shadow with no offset and no blur, so that replaces the text. Of course older browser don't understand anything of this, so we must provide a fallback for the color:

select {
  color: #000;
  color: rgba(0,0,0,0);
  text-shadow: 0 0 0 #000;
}

This is when IE9 comes into play: it supports rgba but not text-shadow, so you will get an apparently empty select box. Get your version of Modernizr with text-shadow detection and do...

.no-textshadow select {
  color: #000;
}

Enjoy.


Here is a collaboration of solutions to fix styling issues with Firefox select boxes. Use this CSS selector as part of your usual CSS reset.

Class removes outline as per question but also removes any background image (as I usually use a custom dropdown arrow and Firefoxes system dropdown arrow can't currently be removed). If using background image for anything other than dropdown image, simply remove line background-image: none !important;

@-moz-document url-prefix() {
    select, select:-moz-focusring, select::-moz-focus-inner {
       color: transparent !important;
       text-shadow: 0 0 0 #000 !important;
       background-image: none !important;
       border:0;
    }
}

This will target all firefox versions

@-moz-document url-prefix() { 
    select {
       color: transparent !important;
       text-shadow: 0 0 0 #000 !important;
    }
}

You might want to remove the !important, if you plan to have the outline appear on other pages across your site that use the same stylesheet.


In general, form controls are impossible to style to that degree of accuracy. There's no browser I'm aware of that supports a sensible range of properties in all controls. That's the reason why there're a gazillion JavaScript libraries that "fake" form controls with images and other HTML elements and emulate their original functionality with code:

http://ryanfait.com/resources/custom-checkboxes-and-radio-buttons/

...