In the Quran the word appears once, in the account of Solomon and the throne of the queen of Sheba, where an ifrit of the jinn offers to bring the throne before Solomon can rise from his seat. The construction matters: ifrit qualifies jinn rather than replacing it. It is describing a jinn of a particular kind, formidable and capable, in the way that one might say a champion among them.
Later writing turned the adjective into a species. Compilers of cosmological and folkloric material produced ranked classifications of the jinn, with terms including marid, ghul and silat alongside ifrit, and the rankings do not agree between sources. Anyone who states a fixed hierarchy of jinn types is reporting one scheme among several and usually not saying which. What is consistent across them is that ifrit denotes strength and defiance rather than an element or a habitat.
The fiery ifrit of modern fantasy, a fire elemental with a fixed appearance and statistics, arrives through nineteenth century translations of the Thousand and One Nights, then through pulp fiction, then through games. It is a real lineage and a traceable one, and it has almost nothing to do with the Quranic usage. Both are worth knowing; running them together produces confident nonsense about Islamic belief.