by , 12:50 PM EDT, September 19th, 2008

On Thursday, the Surfin' Safari blog announced the next generation Javascript accelerator, SquirrelFish Extreme. Benchmarks show that it is over three times faster than Webkit 3.1.

"Just three months ago, we announced SquirrelFish, a major revamp of our JavaScript engine featuring a high-performance bytecode interpreter. Today we'd like to announce the next generation of our JavaScript engine -- SquirrelFish Extreme (or SFX for short). SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast native code generation, to deliver even more JavaScript performance," according to the blog.

SunSpider Benchmark: larger is better

The team described four techniques that make SFX so fast: bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline cache, context theaded JIT compiler and regular expression improvements.

Javascript accelerators are important because they enable a new breed of Web-based apps that can have the same functionality and speed as a native app, but run within a browser like Safari. Apple's MobileMe utilizes this emerging technology.