How to make the choice of time zone more convenient?

Question

The list of time zones is quite long, a lot of duplication and not very friendly to programmers, not to mention the end users.

Is there a way to shorten the list to something more friendly and sufficient for 80% + users? But then how to decide which popular Tz?

The list on Windows seems pretty good, but I'm not sure if this is a good list for the model. This is interesting because DST is optional, so can the list be so short? Someone developed tz equivalents here .

I'm at Pacific Daylight Time (PDT). JS getTimezoneOffset() returns 420 ==> offset -7. If I use the time zone list above, how would I tell him US / Pacific (-8)?

Also, what are the popular names for time zones? US/Pacific or Canada/Pacific convinced that the sound is friendlier than America/Los_Angeles or America/Vancouver .

Finally, how are two time zones above different? Can they be safely grouped together and just use America/Los_Angeles in the app? How will one group be grouped?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Friendly names TZ are subjective - one likes one name, and someone is offended by it. Instead of trying to figure out how to shorten the tz list, why don't you implement geolocation and preset the time zone for users?

This is not 100% accurate, and for traveling people it’s just wrong, but it’s better than getting users to scroll through an endless list, I think.

Answer 2

Take a look at this approach , it works well for me and is well documented on how to do this.