This looks pretty clunky. Is this what Neo4j uses in their viewer? It feels like it's related.

No, Neo4j doesn't use Orb. Orb was released just recently.

It's not, it's also based on d3 (like Neo4j viewer I think), but build from from 0

The code giving a "lot of thought to software design" must be pretty good, because this looks like Java Graybeard garbage to me. Yeah, that's a caustic statement. I'm not trying to say that people who made it didn't do a good job, but the display is just.... Not good enough. They need to find a team member to help them get out of 20 years ago with this stuff. If anyone that is working on this reads this. That's my thought. I am not taking shots at your work. It does look well organized, but I cannot see a reason I would choose this.

What would you expect from a display to be good enough?

Just as a note, Orb is not there to compete with high volume graph visualizations like Cosmograph, Graphistry, Linkurious. It is more as a child from d3 and vis.js, which are great libraries, that uses d3 simulation and vis-like canvas rendering. We really liked what vis.js team did with the styling of the graph and how you can customize it - this is often a limitation for high volume graph visualizations.

We could also discuss about the analytics usability of seeing a graph with 1 billion nodes. It is definitely awesome, but it is too much data to grasp on as a user seeing it. Clustering or other graph algorithms would help. I think the question is: What is the maximum graph size (number of nodes/edges) when it becomes hard to get any useful visual information expect the graph global state? (e.g. seeing a bar chart with 365 columns (days) is harder to read than a bar chart with a smaller sampling, e.g. per week or month).

I don't know the answer to this, but maybe you will have due to your experience with graph visualizations.

You are right. This is a fine rendering layer for datasets of the right size. The space I exist in and am interested in demands a bit more. I think it's just a difference in scale. I do think the article is wrong though. I think we need more graph vis engines of all scales. I think the marketplace for them is just starting to be cracked and there is plenty of room.

What does Neo4j use?

Neo4j uses a fork of VisJS. They call it NeoVis. We didn't go that route because vis-network is tightly coupled and has a lot of calls to the browser window reference which doesn't work in a WebWorker environment. So simulations end up blocking the main thread.