font-style:bold; No such thing. Font-styles are normal, italic, and oblique and I never could see any difference between italic, and oblique. You could use font-weight: bold;
outline:none; is the default, so it doesn't matter (I did use outline for one dropdown)
Had to remove top:-28px; so we could see the dropdowns
NOTE: the top:-28px; could mean that your problem stems from the parent of the dropdown.
Code:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<style type="text/css">
.engine {
height:28px;
position:relative;
//top:-28px;
left:392px;
font-size:15px;
font-style: italic;
}
#engine2 {
height:28px;
position:relative;
//top:-28px;
left:392px;
font-size:15px;
font-weight: bold;
font-style: normal;
}
#engine3 {
height:28px;
position:relative;
//top:-28px;
left:392px;
font-size:15px;
outline: green solid 5px;
font-style: oblique;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<select name="engine" class="engine" id="engine" title="Choose search engine">
<option> Choose one</option>
<option value="google">Google</option>
<option value="yahoo">Yahoo</option>
<option value="ask">ask</option>
<option value="bing">bing</option>
</select>
<select name="engine" class="engine" id="engine2" title="Choose search engine">
<option> Choose one</option>
<option value="google">Google</option>
<option value="yahoo">Yahoo</option>
<option value="ask">ask</option>
<option value="bing">bing</option>
</select>
<select name="engine" class="engine" id="engine3" title="Choose search engine">
<option> Choose one</option>
<option value="google">Google</option>
<option value="yahoo">Yahoo</option>
<option value="ask">ask</option>
<option value="bing">bing</option>
</select>
</body>
</html>
Problem might also stem from not having a doctype.