Addon of the Week: FuBar vs. Titan Panel

EDIT – November 11, 2008: This article is somewhat obsolete as we approach Wrath of the Lich King. Please see my later article, “Move Over Fubar: There’s A New Sheriff In Town!” pubished on November 6, 2008, and its discussion of Data Broker plugins.

Many people are familiar with two popular info-bar addons, Titan Panel and FuBar. The best description I can give for these utilities is “infobars.” They both enable other modules to be “plugged in” to them, which either provide information, or allow you to access other addons by moving minimap icons to the bars. Thus, both have their own libraries, so the overhead by adding more modules is minimal.

The default setup for both is the same: A narrow, screen-width bar at the top and bottom of your screen, to which you can attach any number of additions. Both allow you to stack the two bars if you wish, and position them either at the top or the bottom. FuBar also has the capability for more than two bars, but if you need three or more, you’re even nuttier than I am about addons!

FuBar has no built-in modules; Titan Panel comes with a bunch of built-in modules, including a performance meter (not enabled by default), which can tell you your framerate, latency, and add-on memory use.

Additional built-in Titan modules track ammo, bag slots (empty/total), a clock, map coordinates, item bonus tracker, display of group loot type, money (but only for the current character), regeneration rate, repair meter, a rider module that should equip your riding gear (carrot, spurs, riding crop) when mounted, and a configurable XP meter. So logging in with the vanilla Titan Panel active (as well as default modules enabled, plus the performance meter), I’m using 7.97MB of memory. I disabled the bottom bar, and disabled everything except the performance meter. In fact, I removed all the extraneous stuff from my /addons folder to give me as close to a match to FuBar as I could. This dropped me down to 7.40MB memory used. Not bad at all.

FuBar, with only PerformanceFu loaded and enabled (to most closely simulate Titan Panel) also uses 7.40MB in its most vanilla form.

The thing is, for the default Titan Panel modules, there are generally better ones available–so you end up with wasted disk space, if nothing else. (Although to be fair, most of the additional modules have their own folders, which can simply be deleted if disk space is tight–but in this day of pennies for megabytes, disk space should be the least of your concerns!) So, let’s compare the two with a few typical–and similar–modules added.

As you can see from the shot below, these addons don’t take up much screen real estate at all. This shot is Titan, but bare-bones, FuBar looks just about the same (the background is a different color).

The next shot shows a few of the built-in Titan functions enabled, as well as the main Titan menu. Placement of items on the Titan bar is in the order you check them on the menu. Most Titan add-ons don’t give you an option for left or right side.

The following shot is my FuBar setup on one of my Rogues. Note there are two bars on top (I don’t care for a bottom bar, YMMV).

Note also that addons are positioned to the left, right, and center of the bar. FuBar has a LOT more flexibility than Titan in this regard: You can designate left, right, or center; once you’ve done that, you can then drag’n'drop in your preferred order:

So…which one to get? Both offer a wealth of optional addons–simply search on Titan or FuBar at any mod site–but for me, FuBar gets the nod on a couple points: First, it’s a lot more flexible, and more easily configured, than Titan. Second, it’s an Ace2 program, which means (generally) after a patch, components are more quickly updated. For a long time, I resisted the move to FuBar, but once I did, I haven’t looked back.

And just to be clear: There are plenty of (to me) useless addons for both of these, but overall, either is an excellent addition to your UI: A “must-have.”

EDIT: I compared bare-bones memory use between the two above, but neglected to follow through with other modules added to each. The bottom line is, with both bars similarly configured, the difference in memory use is negligible. It seems there is a “consensus” that FuBar uses a lot less memory (i.e., Titan is a memory hog), but my testing shows that is simply not the case. So that shouldn’t be the factor that sways your decision.