Switching to Slimbox
Apr 04, 2007Generally pop-ups are a bad thing. Even when they’re used with the best intentions pop-ups have such a bad stigma these days that it’s best to stay away from them.
On the other hand it’s nice to be able to have clickable thumbnails on your site that display the full sized image without requiring the user to leave the page.
My solution to this problem in the past was to use Lightbox, a very slick way of display full size images without resorting to pop-up windows. The one gripe I’ve always had about Lightbox is by the time you include the Lightbox, Prototype, and Scriptaculous javascripts you’re looking at about 100k or so if files that have to be downloaded. On a broadband connection this isn’t a big deal, but for anybody using a slower connection it’s a pain.
Switching to Slimbox has resolved this issue for me. Combined with the mootools framework is comes in at a nice compact 25k and makes for much faster load times. It’s also completely backwards compatible with Lightbox, so there’s no need to down anything but swap out the .js and .css files and change a few lines in your header.