I have been playing around with a few of these gallery, popup window replacements and although they seem to do a lot really well I feel that there is not one place where I can go to see the advantages of one against another.
For instance; Thickbox is great for showing inline and iframed content but I had some difficulty in getting the script to work correctly with AJAX html content, but with iframed content why use AJAX?
Also none of the scripts below can get anything close to showing a HTML page with a JAVA virtual tour in it without crashing Firefox on Windows very badly - And Exclusively Firefox on Windows, (versions 1.56 - 2.0 and the latest JAVA from SUN - I even tried it with Microsofts JAVA - that had no luck) Firefox, Safari, Konqueror and IE 6 - 7 handle the operation without any problems. All I can assume is that there is an issue with JAVA and firefox on Windows it seems like a leak somewhere but I can find no answers anywhere on the net if anyone can help it will be most gratefully appreciated.
So get on with the Lightbox Alternatives already…
The Original Lightbox.js 2.02 has to be mentioned, but now in comparison to the others it is heavy on the code and pretty limited really as it only displays image and groups of images. Although the animation produced when activating a window is still really impressive and not matched with as much ease in any of the other scripts with the exception of Litebox which is a recode of the original but much lighter and the version I tend to use most when just showing galleries. Although only for the nice animation effect Lightbox does not automatically resize a photograph to the users open browser window which Thickbox does.
Now we get onto the other scripts that add HTML content functionality to the idea and for most uses these should within the next year or so totally replace popup windows from browsers and create a whole new set of problems for users (or not).
The most famous ones are Thickbox and GreyBox, ThickBox is in my opinion a bit more rubust and offers more options - although I am quite at a loss why you would want to use AJAX to bring up another page in the box when iframe content works fine. But Thickbox offers a few more compelling reasons to choose it over any of the other alternatives. Those are the fact that it will resize and image to the users viewing size, automatically centering the box in the middle of the screen and that the CSS is really easy to alter. Also the online documentation is about the best for any of these scripts and its HTML linking methods make a bt more sense than using Greybox.
Thickbox also supports Galleries of Images with next and previous buttons whilst to my knowledge Greybox does not.
Greybox only really beats Thickbox because of its inbuilt animation (Greybox is styled after osX popup dialogs so Im almost already sold!) which makes it easier to implement in a site if animation is required. The Greybox Redux project brings the size of the script down to reasonable size without losing much of its functionality. But I must say that the documentation is very poor with either of these scripts and trying to do anything but the default is difficult and will take some searching on the web and in the script files.
Other alternatives are Prototype Window Class that basically does everything that GreyBox does but adds a robust skinning concept to the mix and different animation techniques. This one is well worth playing around with if your site is heavily styled and seems to be stable enough for mainstream use although the linking technique is a bit more difficult to handle than any of the previous scripts, but not too difficult to work out.
There are obviously hundreds of others but these are my most used at the moment, if anyone has any suggestions fell free to leave them and Ill update the list.