How do the performance characteristics of jQuery selectors differ from those of CSS selectors?

Posted by Moss on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Moss
Published on 2009-12-04T10:35:06Z Indexed on 2010/03/23 6:03 UTC
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I came across Google's Page Speed add-on for Firebug yesterday. The page about using efficient CSS selectors said to not use overqualified selectors, i.e. use #foo instead of div#foo. I thought the latter would be faster but Google's saying otherwise, and who am I to go against that?

So that got me wondering if the same applied to jQuery selectors. This page I found the link to on SO says I should use $("div#foo"), which is what I was doing all along, since I thought that things would speed up by limiting the selector to match div elements only. But is it really better than writing $("#foo") like Google's saying for CSS selectors, or do CSS versus jQuery element matching work in different ways and I should stick with $("div#foo")?

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