Is this a new trend? Sorting the values from a drop-down list in a random order? I thought people use binary search instinctively.

http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/1360/clipboard01as5.gif

That's crazy. I see no advantage in doing it that way at all.

That list is hardly random.

So if it's not random, what's the criteria? When YouTube launched the international versions, the country names were listed (almost) alphabetically:
http://bp3.blogger.com/_ZaGO7GjCqAI/Rnfo0V4psgI/AAAAAAAAC8M/b1yXfsE9Gyc/s640-h/youtube-france.png

Since somedays the list is like Ionut posted. I'm from Germany

Really weird.
Maybe (I don't really believe it) they are sorting by "countries most switched to by people using the country switcher"? That would make remotely sense (even though not that much, as it would make the job harder for everyone except the top 3 or so...)

Well, it's not random, but that's not to say I get all the logic behind it.

Look at them as groups of countries according to language-family. I'm not 100% sure if this is the case, but that's my impression when I look at the list.

It's not clever to associate countries with their languages mostly because some countries have more than a single official language, for example: Canada.

Heh, I'm Canadian.

I don't think it is grouped just by specific official languages, but rather by the dominant language-family of countries.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Languengl.gif

[from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family]

Why dows it say "Irish" for ireland?

My default language is set to Irish. I don't know why, I am French and I've never selected the flag of Ireland in the list...

But irish lanuage is hardly used! even irish youtube is english! how did you set youtube to irish language?

I told you it's not a good idea to associate countries with languages. The chart probably says "Irish" because it's "the first official language of the Republic of Ireland" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_language).