I have some programs that do it one way, some the other. After a few years' experience with both methods i find that i like the "arial" list better. I can read the font names that way. When they're displayed in their own font, usually at 9 point or so, it's often impossible to read the names and at that size it's hard to tell what the font looks like.

What i do is to highlight a section of text, pull down the font menu, click on any font name, then use the up & down arrows to scroll through the menu. I see the font name in arial on the pulldown menu, and i see the highlighted text on the screen in that font. I can quickly scroll up and down the list, seeing what my selected text looks like in any or every font, in whatever size i'm using. For even quicker scrolling through the list, type in the first letter of the font you're looking for and the menu will jump right to that section. Page Up & Page Down work also.