Stop event bubbling - increases performance?

Performance benefits? Yes, there are some slight benefits, as outlined in this performance test between jQuery live() and on(). As @Joseph also noted, the difference between the two is that live propagates all the way up the tree, while on() only goes to the nearest common parent.

In those tests, it is shown that on() can outperform live() by up to 4 times. In practice, that's probably still not worth splitting hairs over, but if you have very deep html structures and lots of event triggers, the performance difference in stopping propagation can be worthwhile, I suppose.

here's a comparison between on() and live() which involve bubbling and the reason jQuery replaced live(). the problem with live() was that events were attached to the document, causing a long travel up the tree to find the handler. what you can do with on() is you can attach the handler to the nearest common parent, thus avoiding the long travel up the tree in search for a handler - which means faster performance.

but i suggest doing your own benchmarks to check.

This test shows there is a performance advantage to killing the event early. (15%-30%) And there would probably be a bigger difference on a complex DOM. Its also interesting to note that capturing event listeners seem to be slightly faster than bubbling event listeners regardless of what you do with the event after handling it. Strange but interesting; I only tested in one browser though