My thoughts exactly. Worse, it's not the only problem like this, even though it's probably the most common and annoying one, and the one that's not solved well by various workarounds. (Date picking is a close second. And yes, I'm aware of the corresponding HTML5 input type. It's still not supported in any major browsers.)

I don't understand why this isn't solved, but even more so I don't understand why most people seem to be perfectly happy with the current state of things. In fact, I get the impressions most web developers like this. They like writing scripts to solve trivial problems or finding obscure scripts that do it for them. Makes them feel helpful and important, or something. Me? Makes me angry. This should have been conclusively solved a decade ago.

I'm seriously considering writing my own toy browser. Not that someone will use it, but at least I will be able to tell for sure how difficult is it to solve all these trivial problems.