How to make selecting a timezone more user-friendly?

The list of time zones is rather long, lots of duplication, and not very friendly to programmers let alone end-users.

Is there a way to shorten the list to something friendlier and sufficient for 80%+ of users? But then how shall one decide which are the popular Tz?

The list in Windows seems pretty good, but I'm not sure if that's a good list to model after. It is interesting because DST is optional, is that why the list can be that short? Someone worked out the tz equivalents here.

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

Furthermore, what are the popular names for time zones? US/Pacific or Canada/Pacific sure sounds friendlier then America/Los_Angeles or America/Vancouver.

Lastly, how are the 2 timezones above different? Can they be safely grouped together and just use America/Los_Angeles in the app? How shall one group time zones together?