count() vs length in Protractor

Question

According to the documentation, there are 2 ways to get how many elements are inside the ElementArrayFinder (the result of element.all() call):

Answer 1

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$$(".myclass").length

Need to resolve the promise to get the length of element correctly.

// WORK
$$(".myclass").then(function(items){
  items.length;
});

// DOES NOT WORK
$$(".myclass").length; 

---

$$(".myclass").count()

A wrapper for $$('.myclass').length which being a promise itself and doesn't require to resolve promise like .length

$$(".myclass").count(); 

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which one should be preferred?

Unless there some complex business when locating $$(".myclass") and .then(function(items){...}) involved then items.length will give better performance.

Otherwise $$(".myclass").count() should always be used.