Run results for: childNodes vs children vs firstChild vs firstElementChild

Run details:

User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/96.0.4664.45 Safari/537.36

Browser: Chrome 96

Operating system: Windows

Device Platform: Desktop

Date tested: 2 years ago

Test name	Executions per second
childNodes[0]	2626237.0 Ops/sec
children[0]	2584729.0 Ops/sec
firstChild	4714312.0 Ops/sec
firstElementChild	4619174.0 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