Had no good idea for a benchmark yet. So for now just looked if the change had any negative impact on the existing ones and also could not see one (as mentioned in the initial comment), so just kept the draft code.

No idea if node iterator is faster/slower than two domUtils.getElementsByNS calls (which might be backed by optimized getElementsByNS-implementations). Felt simply more sane to iterate just once.

What do you mean with "avoid lot of the subsequent branching"?