A colleague and I were discussing usability and drop downs and we wanted to know:
Is there a best practice or rule-of-thumb for how many items in a web form drop down (select) is too many? At what point should I shift from a drop down to something like an Ajax auto-complete?
This was prompted by a country drop down, which would have a few hundred entries, but is of interest to us in general, as well. Our user community is generally very novice.
Answer
From the Microsoft Guidelines:
Choose a list length that eliminates unnecessary vertical scrolling. Because drop-down lists are displayed on demand, their lists should show up to 30 items. Editable list boxes (those that don't have a drop-down button) should show between 3 and 12 items.
This refers mostly to desktop applications, but I'm not sure there's much difference in this regard. And the bit about the scrolling is important. I think that once you have over three list-lengths, it's time to start looking for another control.
BTW: an extremely similar question about this on IxDA from a while back.
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