Good ways to improve jQuery selector performance?

Question

I'm looking for any way that I can improve the selector performance of a jQuery call. Specifically things like this:

Is $("div.myclass") faster than $(".myclass")

I would think it might be, but I don't know if jQuery is smart enough to limit the search by tag name first, etc. Anyone have any ideas for how to formulate a jQuery selector string for best performance?

Answer 1

There is no doubt that filtering by tag name first is much faster than filtering by classname.

This will be the case until all browsers implement getElementsByClassName natively, as is the case with getElementsByTagName.