With FireFox without firebug active, I get :
div container ~= 2500ms
doc fragment ~= 3400ms

IE8 takes ~= 5400ms (and ~= 1500ms with innerHTML), I hope MS will fix that in IE9 :p.

Without web inspector:
~350ms – Dom Level 1 Method with DocumentFragment
~350ms – Dom Level 1 Method with div container

With web inspector open:
~1300ms – Dom Level 1 Method with DocumentFragment
~800ms – Dom Level 1 Method with div container

(results fluctuate wildly for this test on chrome, so the above is approxomate)

When I use document.createElement(’div’) instead of document.createDocumentFragment(), it gives me the best results on Chrome. I know it’s not exactly the same test as I add one more container DIV but it’s quite interesting.

3725ms – Dom Level 1 Method with Div Buffer
6834ms – Dom Level 1 Method with DocumentFragment

Added a couple of variations on the DOM level 1 methods, including one that only does 1 append to container. It’s faster in Firefox but slower in IE, but the differences are minor.

Very interesting to run the tests before & after opening the web inspector in webkit.

“Doug Crockford has pointed out that in Javascript, bitwise operations aren’t close to the hardware, which stands in contrast to other languages. In fact, if you look at it, bitwise operations can still be faster than alternative operations; Jake shows an example where bitwise parsing of hex codes is faster than bitwise. The question is, how much faster. In many cases, such as this example, you’re energy is better spent on optimising big things.”

is actually quite hard to understand and it’s not just the fact that “you’re” should be “your” and there’s a question mark missing. Perhaps a quick post-edit would be some help?