Here are the current initial goals:

• Provide better application UI responsiveness
• Improve stability from slow rendering or crashes caused by content
• Improve performance, especially on multi-core machines

Now why do this, and what does it even mean?  Well, both Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 have moved in this direction for increased stability.  For an example, with multi-process support, a single tab crash wouldn’t take down your entire Firefox browsing experience.  It would only effect that one tab, because it would be seen as its own process. 

It might be a year or more before we see this in action via our own Firefox installations, however it is nice to see that Firefox is always looking to expand and check into other areas of stabilization to see if we can all benefit from it.

WebChunks is a Firefox 3′s implementation of Microsoft Web Slices.  It allows you to “follow” an area of a web page through a dedicated feed bookmarked in a new toolbar. Clicking on the toolbar entry shows the information related to your choice in a popup, without the need to open a complete web page.

Where would you use this in the real world?

Now the famous example of this is eBay.  Lets say you wanted to follow an item you were bidding on, but you only wanted to follow the box that had the actual auction information in it.  WebChunks allows you to just watch that section.  When the auction is over, delete it.

Still lost?  Don’t be worried,  I was too.  Check out the developer’s tutorial on how to use the WebChunks add-on for more information on the idea.  For me, this new feature is on the fence of being useful on one side and un-necessary on the other.

This add-on was a runner up in the Extend Firefox 3 contest.  Check out this past post to see some of the other winners.