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Comment by rorrr | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiousity I tested that particular statement, and you're right. Compared to

    $('#foo').attr('bar', 'baz');

your code is

30 times faster in Chrome 9

81 times faster in Firefox 3.6

View on HN

47 times faster in Firefox 3.6.1 7 times faster in IE 8

In most cases, though, using jquery to do something like adding a class, or setting a value, is still plenty fast enough. We're talking about code that runs in the browser, where things move on human timescales. Don't optimize prematurely.

The problems start when you add a class to 10,000 elements on the page. And yes, I've seen pages doing this with jquery where the jquery overhead was what made the difference between a 20ms operation (not user-perceptible) and a 1s operation (very much user-perceptible).

Could you share your test code?

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