Which jquery overlay library is best?

Question

I've used lightbox and fancybox quite a lot but never really seen any reason to choose one over another. There are also a whole bunch I have not used like these http://planetozh.com/projects/lightbox-clones/ . The data on that page is quite old and in many cases incorrect.

Are there any good reasons to choose one over the others? Performance, API options, ease of customization etc.

This is more of a subjective question than a black and white one. I haven't seen any comparisons on this topic don't know where else to ask this.

edit After looking at the suggestions I think fancybox has the best api and it's only 5kb gzipped. http://fancybox.net/api Colorbox also looks very good.

Answer 1

I've always had good luck with ThickBox, but I also haven't messed around much with any of the others. I like that one due to the ease of implementation. Sript.aculo.us for ProtoType has a lot of awesome features for overlays as well, but I sometimes feel like ProtoType is a bit clunky to work with... My personal opinion though.

However, I assume that most of the different implementations of overlays for jQuery use the same underlying functions in the framework, so it will probably be hard to see a real performace difference between say, ThickBox and LightBox. The real judge of performance would be the framework itself.

There are several sites out there that compare the various javascript frameworks. Here is one. I would start looking there and once you find a good framework then focus on which overlay add-on is easiest to implement and has the features you need. Sorry, I know that doesn't really answer your question, but at the least, hopefully it helps :)

Answer 2

jQuery tools also has an overlay plugin. It's pretty decent.

Answer 3

i like colorbox