I'm looking at showing a large version of a thumbnail in a ruby on rails application when the user hovers over an image. The large version would be shown as a floating popup (near or at the mouse cursor) and disappear if the mouse moves away. When I say large image I'm talking about around 300x300 (where the thumbnails are under 100x100) so I don't think a lightbox solution is necessary.
I've been using prototype so far for my javascript and ideally I'd like to stay away from using both prototype and jQuery. I'd also like the large versions of the image not to load with the page (or perhaps load after everything else) in order to preserve page speed and reduce bandwidth.
Has anyone done anything similar to this or is there are a library out there which makes things easier? Any advice would be appreciated and anything that prevents me having to deal with the horror of IE compatibility even more so. Although I'm not too concerned with IE6 compatibility for this particular site if it's a major issue.