While researching how to install Firefox 1.0 on Ubuntu, I ran across the following statement on Ubuntu forums:

(from http://backports.ubuntuforums.org/ )

I figured that a stable release was just that: a stable release that you can muck around with (like installing FF1.0) and make as unstable as you like. Could someone explain what the above statement is referring to, and/or what makes a release "stable" and who decides?

Thanks.

Most linux distros, after releasing something official, they start evolving this release, using new things and updating software, in order to reach the next release. The users may try those new things, and report bugs if they find any. After the new updates are tested enough, then a new official release is released which is considered to be stable, and they may stop offering updates for the last release.

Fedora is from it's nature an unstable release, because they use the most up-to-date software there. Red-hat has an enterprise edition, for which you have to pay and in which more conservative tactics are used. Actually fedora is what in the future the enterprise edition will use. An unstable release is a release you can use as a desktop and play with it, but you would never use in a company where security and stability are your number one goal. This does not mean that an unstable release will crash all the time. It's just a very quickly evolving release that is not tested as much as the maintainers would like, in order to characterize it as stable.

You can still easily install Firefox, it just means that the distribution maintainers won't add things to the distribution once it goes stable. Once it's safely on your computer you can do whatever you like.