Run results for: Fastest way to list children: childNodes vs children vs firstChild/nextSibling vs firstElementChild/nextElementSibling v2

Result: firstElementChild is the fastest yielding 3-4X performance. With lastElementChild close 2nd. Other observations: doing for loop i-- with children shows ~150% higher performance vs i++. And unloading it into a variable prior yields another ~200% boost

Go to the benchmark

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/150.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/150.0.0.0

Browser: Chrome 150

Operating system: Windows

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: 28 days ago

Test name	Executions per second
✓ lastElementChild previousElementChild	14,574,246 Ops/sec
children-- (into variable)	7,673,501 Ops/sec
firstElementChild nextElementChild	5,821,074 Ops/sec
firstChild nextSibling	5,637,991 Ops/sec
ChildNodes for-- (direct)	3,904,926 Ops/sec
ChildNodes for (into variable)	2,674,732 Ops/sec
children-- (direct)	2,516,341 Ops/sec
children (direct)	1,964,388 Ops/sec
ChildNodes for-- (into variable)	1,320,653 Ops/sec
childNodes foreach	1,311,525 Ops/sec

Test name

Executions per second

✓ lastElementChild previousElementChild

14,574,246 Ops/sec

children-- (into variable)

7,673,501 Ops/sec

firstElementChild nextElementChild

5,821,074 Ops/sec

firstChild nextSibling

5,637,991 Ops/sec

ChildNodes for-- (direct)

3,904,926 Ops/sec

ChildNodes for (into variable)

2,674,732 Ops/sec

children-- (direct)

2,516,341 Ops/sec

children (direct)

1,964,388 Ops/sec

ChildNodes for-- (into variable)

1,320,653 Ops/sec

childNodes foreach

1,311,525 Ops/sec

Tests:

childNodes foreach
parent.childNodes.forEach(function (node) { let n = node; });
children (direct)
for (let i = 0; i < parent.children.length; i++) { let n = parent.children[i]; }
firstChild nextSibling
let elem = parent.firstChild; do { let n = elem; } while (elem = elem.nextSibling)
firstElementChild nextElementChild
let elem = parent.firstElementChild; do { let n = elem; } while (elem = elem.nextElementSibling)
ChildNodes for (into variable)
let children = parent.childNodes; for (let i = 0; i < children.length; i++) { let n = children[i]; }
children-- (direct)
for (let i = parent.children.length-1; i >= 0; i--) { let n = parent.children[i]; }
ChildNodes for-- (into variable)
for (let i = parent.childNodes.length-1; i >= 0; i--) { let n = parent.childNodes[i]; }
ChildNodes for-- (direct)
let children = parent.childNodes; for (let i = children.length-1; i >= 0; i--) { let n = children[i]; }
lastElementChild previousElementChild
let elem = parent.lastElementChild; do { let n = elem; } while (elem = elem.previousElementSibling)
children-- (into variable)
let children = parent.children for (let i = children.length-1; i >= 0; i--) { let n = children[i]; }