title: Watir web driver taking too long to get the selected item from drop down
body: <p>I am using watir web driver for web scraping, where I fill the form and get the results. The results also includes the dropdown list, from where I have to extracted the currently selected text. I have used following queries.</p>
  
  <pre><code>selectedList = browser.select_list(:id =&gt; "itemType")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>From this i can use following query:</p>
  
  <pre><code>selectedText = selectedList.selected_options.map(&amp;:text)[0]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Using this query, I am able to get the selected text. But the problem is, the drop-down list contains thousands of options, and watir is taking too long to find the selected option using this query.</p>
  
  <p>Any faster method is appreciated.
  Also I have tried with following queries:</p>
  
  <pre><code>selected = selectedList.selected_options()[0]
  selectedText = selected.text
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But the problem is same. I have other dropdowns with smaller options, where both of these queries are performing good, but with thousands of options, its really slow.</p>