I've found that "children" performs slower than "find" and this difference is magnified by the complexity of the web page -- when you get into thousands of divs, it is even noticable by the end user.

This is the code in jQuery to get children:

children: function(elem){return jQuery.sibling(elem.firstChild);},

In my test, I called "children" 500x to find some elements. It took 1624 ms.

Using "find" took 843ms.

But changing the implementation of children to return elem.childNodes brought the time down to 77ms!

Could you verify this change and update the jQuery implementation. There may be similar speedups available to siblings, parent, etc.

These are numbers from running on FF3.