This has been discussed before, here. It died out, though.
I disagree to the “better” part 
That is, I don’t have anything against optimization, but behind-the-curtains magic like this is by and large something nobody knows about. Slight modifications of the code can lead to it not happening, and nobody knows why.
Therefore, I would opt for having both. I also think that @nzok put it well in the linked thread by saying that compare is intention-revealing, while a chain of < == > clauses is less so.