Swing uses Strings in a lot of places: property names, default names, etc. In turn, there are many calls to String.equals() during the course of a Swing app. Due to String interning, and the fact that most of the Strings in Swing are constants, we should be able to get away with using == instead of the more expensive equals(). There are, of course, compatiblity risks to this approach, but it would be interesting to at least get an idea of what sort of benefit this could afford us.