Run results for: childNodes vs children vs firstChild vs firstElementChild

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/94.0.4606.81 Safari/537.36 OPR/80.0.4170.63

Browser: Opera 80

Operating system: Windows 7

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: 2 years ago

Test name	Executions per second
childNodes[0]	5659409.0 Ops/sec
children[0]	5432743.0 Ops/sec
firstChild	8785141.0 Ops/sec
firstElementChild	8679328.0 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