When I bump into a country selector, I always type the first bit of my country's name so the cursor will jump to it. I doubt I'm the only one. In effect, for me

When I bump into a country selector, I always type the first bit of my country's name so the cursor will jump to it. I doubt I'm the only one. In effect, for me, it _is_ a text field. Just a really bad one that doesn't always work how I expect, makes a lot of noise and has poor visual feedback. For other users it is a gigantic list that is hard to deal with on a smaller screen. (There's some room for bias here, by the way: lots of web developers live in those countries that get listed first - for reasons which speak directly to why this whole thing is a terrible idea - and lots of web developers have big screens that cope reasonably well with colossally tall menus).