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Code-named SquirrelFish, the new interpreter simplifies the method used to interpret the code, eliminating the overheads that hampered its predecessor. The result is that it is able to exactly describe the operations required to execute a script, stripping out "irrelevant grammatical structure", in the words of the developers of WebKit, Safari's open source rendering engine

Not content with this, the WebKit developers plan further improvements, many of which will be of greater benefit to Windows users, who are taking

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to Safari in increasing numbers.

SquirrelFish is included in the latest nightly build of the WebKit browser (aka "Safari beta"), while a detailed explanation of how SquirrelFish works is provided in the Surfin' Safari blog.

UPDATE: According to tests run with WebKit's SunSpider JavaScript benchmarking engine, SquirrelFish WebKit builds are 1.46 times faster than Firefox, and 2.67 times faster than Opera. Cameron Zwarich has published the results in his Summer of JavaScriptCore blog.