jQuery single selector vs .find()

Question

Which is better to use as a performance perspective:

$(".div1 h2, .div1 h3") 

or

$(".div1").find("h2, h3") 

Answer 1

http://jsperf.com/selector-vs-find-again

selector is faster

(NOTE: made up random html just so it wasn't just those elements on the page)

Answer 2

The answer to your question is: yes.

Don't worry about the performance difference, unless your code is slow. If it is, use a profiler to determine bottlenecks.

From an analysis standpoint:

$(".div1 h2, div1 h3") 

should be faster as jQuery will pipe it through querySelectorAll (if it exists) and native code will run faster than non-native code. It will also save on an additional function call.

$(".div1").find("h2, h3") 

is better if you plan on chaining some other functions on .div1:

$(".div1").find("h2, h3").addClass('foo').end().show();