Question

I heard, that second syntax is much faster. Is it right?

$('div *')

or

$('div').find('*')

Or both take equal time?

EDIT:
Ok, downvoters, lets see this TEST (thanks to @AlienWebguy). Can anybody explain?

Answer 1

Exact results may depend upon the page HTML and specific selector query, but this jsperf says that the $('div').find('*') is way, way slower than $('div *') in the HTML case I picked.

For a question like this to be meaningful, you have to specify an exact selector and a body of HTML that you’re going to run it against.

Now that you’ve added a test that uses some specific HTML (but a different selector), I thought I’d run your HTML from that test against the actual selectors you asked about in a test that actually tests what you asked about. In Chrome 13, I find the $('div *') selector to be 9 times faster than $('div').find('*') when run against the HTML in your test. You can see the jsperf here.