Pros and cons of various jQuery Modal Window plugins?

Question

I've been using Fancybox for modal pop-ups within my jQuery stuff for a little while.

It's nice. I like it. I do find the CSS a bit unwieldy, though.

I thought I should spend some time and really look at the options and try to decide to 'standardize' on one for my own work.

Have you chosen a standard modal implementation in your jQuery work? If so, which did you go with and why?

For a while there it looked like ThickBox was slowly becoming a defacto recommendation but has since been put out to pasture.

Has anyone found one option clearly leading the pack or are they all pretty much 6/half dozen when compared?

Answer 1

To be honest, I find most modal popups pretty much the same to use- there's pretty much one approach to use (high z-index <div> possibly laid on top of an <iframe>) and in fact, if you can't find one that you like and can style the way you want, then it's pretty easy to write your own.

Answer 2

I use jQuery UI's dialog, witch can be set to modal. It's easy to use and customize, and it's stable. It's a lot of activity in the jQuery UI project, and I would be surprised if development stopped anytime soon.

demo

Answer 3

We've had a lot of success with the ColorBox plugin.