When I loaded up new screenshots a few weeks back, I decided to replace Lightbox 2 with John Reid’s PopBox. The more I see Lightbox, the more I find it annoying. It just seems slow. And no matter how many times I use it, I still hit the back button occasionally.
It turns out I’m not the only one. I looked at my web stats for the past two weeks and the number of page views matches the visits almost exactly. Looking at several previous two-week spans, page views are about 5% higher than visits. So the conclusion I came to is that visitors are hitting the back button, realizing their mistake, then returning to the page again.
So if you’re using Lightbox or Lightbox 2, check out PopBox. It’s fast, intuitive, and the script weights in at half the combined file size of Lightbox 2 and its dependencies.
5 responses so far ↓
Daniel Lucraft // Oct 22, 2007 at 10:58 am
You are so right. Lightbox and others like it are my number 1 web annoyance nowadays.
Actually it might be a tie with the NYT’s double-click dictionary… hard to say.
Nick H. // Oct 22, 2007 at 8:10 pm
There’s probably a greasemonkey script for the NYT double-click annoyance.
I hate to dis Lightbox. It was cool at first, and a nice, free contribution to the web by Lokesh Dhakar. But I just find it a lot slower than just clicking on images that load full-sized on another page.
Martin Bromley // Feb 2, 2008 at 4:33 am
Nice one, Nick! I just went hunting for a back button fix for lightbox (actually sort of hoping I wouldn’t find a good one so I could code one myself), and I stumble across your post.
Will give popbox a go instead, I think.
Martin Bromley // Feb 2, 2008 at 7:19 am
Ahem, after a couple of hours of fiddling about, let me just take back my naively optimistic comments about fixing the back button issue with lightbox…
Turns out it’s way harder than I would have imagined. There is a script here that fixes it. However, it uses Google’s Really Simple History (which isn’t really that simple…) to add an extra item in the browser history when you open the lightbox - works great in Firefox, but it involves a lot of unsightly clicking noises in Internet Explorer, so it’s not a solution I’d use.
I thought a bit more about popbox, and figured it actually wasn’t so different to using lightbox 1 without the transparent background image. Lightbox 1 skips all the animation which makes version 2 a bit slow.
Nick H. // Feb 4, 2008 at 5:18 am
I initially used Lightbox 1, but it still had the problem of the ‘X’ to close, whereas PopBox has the magnifying glass. It’s up to you, of course, but I just found PopBox more intuitive.
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