You can use any browser of your choice. I do.
I have never seen any employee use a Linux desktop. I can't imagine the pain you would have to go through to develop/debug windows stuff on a linux box.
I have seen people use their apple macbook-air to present things often enough though.
I have also seen the IT staff doing their best to help visitors to the campus with config issues even when they use linux.
I know several people who use windows ports of vim/emacs/cygwin etc in their primary desktops. Their code does make it to the public.
We are expected to dogfood our own applications. So yes, we do check out the latest browser, the latest builds of visual studio or what ever else we get asked to check.
Thanks

We store customer specific data hence we are legally mandated to ensure that e.g. EU customers go to EU.
Every time a customer reports a problem, we need to look at web logs or SQL query results from a specific set of machines to help debug it.
The sheer number of data centers we are hosted in makes it impossible to keep them all in sync at any given time, hence its not always possible to debug based on results from the closest data center.

I work with world class developers and an equally competent team of operations folks. The amount of disconnect between the 2 sets of folks is amazing. The developers black box stuff out of their consideration (e.g. setting up load balancers, with or with out affinity, not littering certificates all over the place, the amount of privileges a service needs etc.). The operations folks ignore other aspects (a cache that's hard to build could be lost after a process recycle, not version controlling their ad-hoc queries/sql jobs etc.)
Even if I take out considerations of giving developers access to customer sensitive data, the mere fact that most developers assume that a complete clean reinstall is as trivial as going back to a previous VM image (wrt time considerations) makes me pause and not provide them access. Add to the fact that developers talk in logical terms (regardless of scale) while operations talks in physical terms (actual machine names, drives etc.) and watching them communicate is like watching 2 blind men describe an elephant to you.
Our team makes it mandatory for developers to request for clean concise information from operations who procure it on their behalf. Yes it is slow, yes, it makes the developers having to batch their queries together but I can't imagine doing it any other way right now.

The word "bhut" means ghost in Assam, which is where the pepper is grown.

Just an FYI, but Windows update does not need IE on Vista and beyond

There is already a fork that is being worked upon by Monty (who was the founder of MySQL) I suspect the real contention is over the brand MySQL (which has significant mind-share) which was transferred to SUN and will now go to Oracle.
A lot of medium sized companies use MySQL today and have support contracts with who-so-ever owns the brand itself. They I guess are the ones who are worried - choosing another database is often not an option.

I think the problem that you may be facing is due to firefox doing weird things to generate random numbers at start
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=501605
I see that the bug has since been fixed - but I guess it has not been distributed to the general public via upgrades.

I actually am looking at the Apache2 code right now for some obscure reasons. I have 6 years of professional development experience (though very little of that in C).
What I saw was, it took me like 2 weeks of constant battling to make some sense of the code in any way. GDB, inserting random print statement statements, stace and ltrace helped. However what has come out as the most difficult road block for me is: Macros!
I don't get flustered by pointers too much, but Apache2 code uses some demonic macros, resulting in method invocations being redirected to differently named subroutines in other files.
That and the fact that any substantial project takes 10 minutes to recompile for every trivial thing I change are my real pain points.
Having said that, just because I can now read the code does not let me feel confident that I can contribute code to Apache2. That I think will take way more time!!!