One thing I have noticed is that when you start having a bunch of SELECT elements, or even a heap of OPTION elements within a single SELECT, you can get really bad rendering times.
IIRC, it only took about 2-300 OPTION elements before it was basically unusable on some machines. And these are desktops, not mobile.
In our case, it was _faster_ (in terms of both developer and user time) to have a JS handler that turned a select element with too many options into an autocomplete.
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Or even, if it is a problem the browser vendors might have some opportunities to optimize those websites that have massive <select> tags.
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One thing I have noticed is that when you start having a bunch of SELECT elements, or even a heap of OPTION elements within a single SELECT, you can get really bad rendering times. IIRC, it only took about 2-300 OPTION elements before it was basically unusable on some machines. And these are desktops, not mobile. In our case, it was _faster_ (in terms of both developer and user time) to have a JS handler that turned a select element with too many options into an autocomplete.