If almost 50% of the users managed to crash the GUI with routine tasks in the span of a single hour, that's a sure sign that it isn't ready for prime-time yet, regardless of what anybody's opinions on features or functionality are.
I personally think this is almost definitely going to end up as another Pulseaudo-style debacle that'll jade even more Ubuntu users. This kind of stuff is exactly why I never recommend Linux to friends, even though I personally use it on my day-to-day machine: because it's just not (crashwise) stable enough for Grandma, and Shuttleworth has a very bad habit of making his end-users his beta-testers. Grandma isn't going to loyally log in to Launchpad, report a bug and reboot; she's going to complain to me, and then I'm going to reinstall Windows 7, which for all its faults at least doesn't crash once every two hours.
I know people hate this answer, but this is how I look at that: LTS.
Seriously, I install LTS for several things: servers and non-techies. Why? b/c I view non-LTS releases as awesome for me, you, people on this site but not for my grandma.
What I've seen Ubuntu do is they have given people who want to be on the bleeding edge a way to be on the bleeding edge every 6 months, and that is freakin' awesome. But if you don't want to be there, and frankly, most people don't, they give you an LTS and 10.04 is a pretty freakin' good OS for people who check their webmail and need a writer/spreadsheet with minimal fuss.
Maybe true, but as a web developer I can't in good conscience install an OS for a user that won't upgrade to FF4 for more than 6 months. That's the PPA/milestone release system's blessing and curse: easy to install software, hard to get the latest version without terminal witchcraft or upgrading the entire distro and eating whatever other changes (Unity) that upgrade brings.
Seems perfectly reasonable, and more importantly, prudent given the LTS nature.
To summarize:
* FF4 is available in a PPA right now - ppa:mozillateam/firefox-stable
* 10.04 will continue use FF3.6 in main as long as Mozilla supports it (probably about 6 more months)
* Once mozilla stops support for 3.6, 10.04 will switch to the latest stable (if that is FF5, that is what gets installed).
Seems very reasonable. Imagine if you are a huge corporation and you standardized on Ubuntu 10.04. Would you want every package to get updated to the latest and greatest each time it comes out or would you want security updates to those packages? If you want latest and greatest, jump on the 6 month cycle. If you want to get security updates for a known system, stick to the LTS. Even so, for those that WANT to get the latest of select packages, there are ways.
So, if you feel that having the latest and greatest for your users is important, stick to the non-LTS cycle and pick it and go. You can also install 10.10.
Have a look at the EOL dates...you can use 10.10 with full support until April 2012, getting you through 2 more Ubuntu releases and to the next LTS.
This is what annoys me about the package management/release system of nearly every Linux distro. There's no easy way to cherry-pick just one package (and its dependencies, obviously) from the bleeding-edge branch. It's all or nothing.
Ultimately, flexible package management is what keeps me using Gentoo and dabbling with Exherbo, in spite of the fact that I don't really want to tinker with my OS anymore.
I'm not sure what your Grandma manages to do to the machine, but I've never, ever had Ubuntu crash on me while running the long-term-support versions (currently 10.04). At the same time, if I could get a dollar for each Win7 crash...
I personally think this is almost definitely going to end up as another Pulseaudo-style debacle that'll jade even more Ubuntu users. This kind of stuff is exactly why I never recommend Linux to friends, even though I personally use it on my day-to-day machine: because it's just not (crashwise) stable enough for Grandma, and Shuttleworth has a very bad habit of making his end-users his beta-testers. Grandma isn't going to loyally log in to Launchpad, report a bug and reboot; she's going to complain to me, and then I'm going to reinstall Windows 7, which for all its faults at least doesn't crash once every two hours.