'while' is actually faster than 'for'. But in this example the while loop does extra work (mutating the array). while loops are always faster than forEach, as they simply do less work.
There is an example that doesn't mutate the while. For still seems to be faster in certain browsers (Safari.) I think the bigger takeaway here for me is that mutation has little to no performance hit. In fact, the while shift() example was faster than the non mutating while version.