Mavericks runs absolutely fine on my Early 2011 MBP. Safari has NEVER crashed, Finder has NEVER crashed. IMO, Mavericks is the best release of OS X since SL.
Safari used to crash for me on daily basis in Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion. It crashed every week on Mountain Lion. Since I have been using the Mavericks DP, I don't think I ever seen a single Safari crash. So clearly not a POS. I am sorry to hear that OP is having difficulties, but there will be always people who had less luck with the upgrade.
No issues for me so far with Mavericks, and bearing in mind that i have done upgrades from snow leopard via lion , mountain lion to mavericks over the last 4 years i find that quite impressive that everything still works. i can still play WOW even.
Seriously? $100 billion and they can't test Safari before releasing it? Maybe Mavericks is a a bit faster, but the constant freezes, Finder crashes etc make it unusable. This Safari makes me nuts!
And I have no choice as I just got a new Macbook... Every new system is worse,
what happened to the good old Apple?
Not crashing, incompatibility with standard IMAP protocols, inability to mark messages as read in Gmail on an iPhone and have it sync properly with Mavericks, etc.