I am not deep into Open Source like saying this is THE way to go. I use whatever is the best and for me. Most of them just so happen to be Open Source. Like for example, I use Firefox all the time (using the latest v3 Beta) but I rarely touch Linux.

I have touched on Firefox as I know of the working of the XUL, JS, CSS and XHTML stuff. I did the modifications of Firefox in the Computing Commons (SEQ) to disable certain features like bookmarking and such. It is not "high tech" (in fact more of a hack) as anyone with knowledge of Firefox would be able to get around most of it. Anyway, really you should be using Portable Firefox on the labs.