All three are slow to me. Modifying the dom on each iteration is slow.
http://jsperf.com/jquery-append-vs-html-list-performance/24
I just added a new test in there:
var html = [];
for (var i = 0; i < len; i++) {
html.push('<div>Test ' + i + '</div>');
}
document.getElementById('list').innerHTML = html.join('');
This is much faster again. 🙂
My method in Firefox does 26k Ops/sec vs 1,000, 10,000, and 13