Run results for: childNodes vs children vs firstChild vs firstElementChild

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0.0.0 Safari/537.36

Browser: Chrome 120

Operating system: Linux

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: 2 years ago

firstChild

17.0M/s

firstElementChild

16.4M/s

childNodes[0]

10.5M/s

children[0]

10.5M/s

View exact numbers

Test name	Executions per second
✓ firstChild	17,028,428 Ops/sec
firstElementChild	16,418,841 Ops/sec
childNodes[0]	10,484,387 Ops/sec
children[0]	10,450,944 Ops/sec

HTML Preparation code:

<html>

<body>
    <div id='test'>
        <div name='a'></div>
        <div name='b'></div>
        <div name='c'></div>
    </div>
</body>

</html>

Script Preparation code:

var parent = document.getElementById('test');

Tests:

childNodes[0]
let n = parent.childNodes[0];
children[0]
let n = parent.children[0];
firstChild
let n = parent.firstChild;
firstElementChild
let n = parent.firstElementChild;

Run results for: childNodes vs children vs firstChild vs firstElementChild

Fastest way to list children

childNodes[0]

children[0]

firstChild

firstElementChild