Benchmark: innerhtml vs removechild vs remove vs textContent

HTML Preparation code:

<div id="container"></div>

Script Preparation code:

var node = document.getElementById('container');

for(var i = 0; i < 1000; i++) node.appendChild(document.createElement('div'));

Tests:

innerHTML
var node = document.getElementById('container'); node.innerHTML = '';
removeChild
var node = document.getElementById('container'); while(node.firstChild) node.removeChild(node.firstChild)
remove
var node = document.getElementById('container'); while(node.firstChild) node.firstChild.remove()
textContent
var node = document.getElementById('container'); node.textContent = '';

Rendered benchmark preparation results:

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Previous results

Test case name	Result
innerHTML
removeChild
remove
textContent

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Latest run results:

Run details: (Test run date: 2 years ago)

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.2.1 Safari/605.1.15

Browser/OS: Safari 17 on Mac OS X 10.15.7

View result in a separate tab

Test name	Executions per second
innerHTML	12893257.0 Ops/sec
removeChild	14556511.0 Ops/sec
remove	14600804.0 Ops/sec
textContent	12871568.0 Ops/sec

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated one year ago):

LLMs can make mistakes. Check important info.

**Benchmark Overview**

The provided benchmark, "innerhtml vs removechild vs remove vs textContent", tests the performance of four different approaches for clearing or resetting an HTML element's content.

**Test Cases**

Each test case is defined in the `Individual Test Cases` section. There are four test cases:

1. **innerHTML**: Clears the element's innerHTML property.
2. **removeChild**: Removes all child nodes from the element and then clears its own content.
3. **remove**: A syntax error, likely intended to be `removeNode()` or similar, which is not a standard JavaScript method for removing an element from the DOM. (More on this later.)
4. **textContent**: Sets the element's textContent property.

**Library**

None of the test cases explicitly use any external libraries, but they do rely on the `document` object and HTML elements, which are part of the Web API.

**Special JS Feature or Syntax**

Test case 3, **remove**, is an unusual syntax that does not exist in standard JavaScript. It's possible that this was a typo or an experimental feature that was never intended for production use.

**Comparison**

The test cases compare the performance of clearing or resetting an HTML element's content using different methods:

* `innerHTML`: A simple and efficient way to clear the element's content.
* `removeChild` and `textContent`: More complex approaches that involve removing child nodes and then setting the textContent property.

**Pros and Cons**

Here are some pros and cons of each approach:

* **innerHTML**: Pros: Simple, fast, and widely supported. Cons: Can be slow for very large elements or multiple elements with large content.
* `removeChild` and `textContent`: Pros: More efficient than `innerHTML` for large elements or multiple elements. Cons: More complex, slower, and less widely supported.

**Other Alternatives**

Some alternative approaches that could have been tested include:

* Using the `innerHTML` property to set a string value, followed by parsing and manipulating the HTML.
* Using a library like jQuery or other DOM manipulation libraries to clear or reset the element's content.
* Testing different browser-specific features, such as WebKit's `removeChild()` method or Firefox's `textContent` property.

**Benchmark Results**

The latest benchmark results show that:

* `remove` is not a valid syntax and likely causes errors or crashes in browsers.
* `innerHTML`, `removeChild`, and `textContent` have different performance characteristics, with `remove` being the slowest due to its invalid syntax.

Related benchmarks:

innerhtml vs removechild vs remove vs textContent (version: 0)

Comparing performance of: innerHTML vs removeChild vs remove vs textContent

Created: 2 years ago by: Guest

Jump to the latest result

innerHTML

removeChild

remove

textContent

Suite status: <idle, ready to run>

Fastest: N/A

Slowest: N/A

Autogenerated LLM Summary (model llama3.2:3b, generated one year ago):