It's definitely faster and more stable than 0.97. I don't use the Mail or Chat clients and I don't print that much so I can't really comment on potential bugs there.
My students, on the other hand, are crazy about the Linux version. I mentioned this morning that a new release had come out and they all wanted to go and download it. I settled for grabbing a copy myself and putting it on our classroom file server.
They *love* tabbed browsing.