cytoscape.js v4 HEAD · 96942db8 · built 2026-08-05 20:14Z

Changelog

All notable changes to Cytoscape.js are recorded here. This file starts at the 4.0 line; for the 3.x history see the releases page.

The format follows Keep a Changelog, and this project follows semantic versioning.

[Unreleased] — 4.0.0

v4 is a rewrite of the model and the renderer. The public API keeps v3's shape — cy.add(), eles.filter(), node.position(), the traversal and algorithm surfaces, the alias spellings — while several v3 mechanisms were removed rather than reimplemented.

Porting a v3 app: read MIGRATING.md. It carries the recipe tables, the measured property-by-property diff, and the list of things that compile and then behave differently.

Not released. cytoscape@3 remains the released library.

Added

  • A columnar, CPU-canonical model. Elements live in typed-array columns with stable slots, per-column coalesced dirty spans, a CSR adjacency index and a dictionary-encoded data() sidecar. Reads stay synchronous.
  • A WebGPU renderer: SDF node shapes, curved-edge families evaluated in the vertex stage from live positions, compute culling with indirect draws, GPU picking with a synchronous CPU fast path for nodes, an SDF glyph atlas, early-z, and an adaptive render scale.
  • Structured queries and predicates replacing the selector language — cy.nodes( { selected: true } ), cy.nodes( { data: { w: { gt: 1 } } } ), and plain functions for everything richer.
  • A serializable mapper DSL for style: linear/log/sqrt/pow/ symlog/diverging/ordinal/threshold/quantize scales, OKLab colour interpolation with named schemes, and case conditionals. Paint channels evaluate in a compute kernel; anything read by culling, picking or a columnar scan stays CPU-canonical.
  • Columnar and binary loading. cytoscape.toColumnarElements(), cytoscape.serializeElements() / deserializeElements(), both accepted directly by options.elements and cy.add(). Numeric columns deserialize as zero-copy views.
  • Style transitions (transition-property/-duration/-delay/ -timing-function) and animation controls (pause/resume/reverse, read-only progress/paused).
  • The force layout — GPU-native spring–electric, animating live at 100k nodes, with a CPU reference executor for headless and compound graphs.
  • A registry-free extension contract: cy.layout( { impl } ) runs an imported class or object; LayoutContext is columnar-first, and it, LayoutImpl and CustomLayout are exported types, so an external layout author writes against real types rather than any.
  • chart — v3's 101 numbered pie/stripe properties as one list-valued family with data-driven values, scheme palettes and donut holes.
  • visibility as a paint-only style property beside the structural show()/hide().
  • Slot compaction — cy.compact() (alias cy.gc()) plus an automatic trigger, shrinking scan widths and buffers to the current graph rather than its peak.
  • boxSelectionMode ('contain' | 'overlap'), boxSelectionIncludesLabels, wheelSensitivity, desktopTapThreshold, touchTapThreshold, tapholdDuration.
  • eles.labelBoundingBox(), and labels join boundingBox()/fit() by default.
  • TypeScript declarations built from the source JSDoc, so the API documentation is hover text in an editor.

Changed

  • The stylesheet is { nodes, edges, parents, core } — an object of property objects, not a list of selector blocks.

  • Draw order is structural and stays that way: compound parents, then edges, then leaf nodes, then labels; slot order within a stream.

  • Animations run concurrently by channel and sequence by promise; overlapping channels evict the older animation in place.

  • Colours tween in OKLab, matching the mapper default (v3 tweened per-channel in sRGB).

  • spring( bounce ) replaces spring( tension, friction ).

  • Default curve-style is straight (v3: bezier), and default text-valign is bottom (v3: top).

  • cy.elements() returns nodes then edges, not mixed insertion order.

  • Positions are Float32 (~7 significant digits).

  • Compound event bubbling is v3's, with the remaining ordering deviation confined to within a phase (registration order).

  • stop( jumpToEnd ) — the clearQueue argument is gone with the queue.

  • font-family, font-style, font-weight are global constants, one face per glyph atlas.

  • Rendering requires WebGPU; headless requires nothing.

  • Comparing elements across two instances throws instead of answering wrongly. Element identity is a slot in one store, so the first node of one graph and the first node of another used to compare as the same element: same() returned true, intersection() returned everything, difference() returned nothing, and union() silently dropped the other graph's elements. The twelve affected methods (same, anySame, contains, indexOf, union, difference, intersection, symmetricDifference, diff, allAreNeighbors, edgesWith, edgesTo) now reject a collection from another instance.

  • A corrupt binary payload fails fast rather than allocating for what it declares. Three cases found by fuzzing — an out-of-range dictionary index, an over-long packed-id blob length, and an impossible data-key count — could hang a load or take tens of seconds before erroring; each now throws a contract error naming the field.

Removed

  • Selector strings, everywhere — and cy.$() with them (cy.$id() is the id lookup). Passing one throws, naming the replacement.
  • Classes (addClass/removeClass/toggleClass/hasClass/ flashClass) — data() plus mappers is the replacement.
  • Style functions (( ele ) => props) and per-element style bypass (ele.style( name, value )) — both throw.
  • CSS-string stylesheets and cytoscape.stylesheet().
  • z-index, z-compound-depth, z-index-compare, sortByZIndex, zDepth.
  • restore(), clone(), copy() and the import form of cy.json(): removed elements are terminally dead.
  • The animation queue, the queue option and the step callback (all three spellings throw).
  • Custom easing functions — cubic-bezier() and linear() cover any drawable curve.
  • Event namespaces: a type is matched whole, so 'tap.ns' is one literal name.
  • The vmouse* aliases and raw mouse/touch re-emits (mousedown, click, touchstart, …) — pointer* is their modern spelling. mouseover/mouseout still fire. These names still register and then never fire, because custom event names must stay legal.
  • cy.notify() / noNotifications() — the renderer is dirty-driven.
  • renderTo; per-element font-family; viewport-fixed labels.
  • The canvas-era performance options — hideEdgesOnViewport, textureOnViewport (+ outside-texture-bg-*), motionBlur, motionBlurOpacity.
  • Style properties: background-blacken, bounds-expansion, content, padding-{left,right,top,bottom}, position, display, text-metrics, box-selection, box-select-labels, edge-text-rotation, the min-*-bias-* quartet, the singular control-point-distance/ segment-distance/segment-weight/segment-radius spellings, the mid-*-arrow-fill/-width pairs, and the numbered pie-N-*/stripe-N-* families. The no-dash shape spellings (roundrectangle, cutrectangle, concavehexagon) throw in all three enums that took them.
  • The cose layout — not ported; force is v4's answer.
  • The extension registry — no cytoscape.use(); extensions are imports.

Not yet implemented

  • border-style, outline-style, text-border-style (and border-dash-pattern/-offset, border-cap/-join).
  • cytoscape.warnings() and the error policy behind it.
  • Functional preventDefault() for v4's own gesture defaults; the DOM half works.
  • Core, collection and renderer extension points.

Known deviations

Accepted differences from v3's rendering and semantics — arrow tips on approximate boundaries for some shapes, butt caps on layer strokes, uneven dashes on eccentric ellipses, a conservative edge-label bounding term, no decimation on the curved edge stream, and others — are enumerated in src/README.md under "Known deviations from v3". Each is recorded where the feature is described, with the reason.