You forgot Chrome :). I've had that freeze up only once or twice, just from stupid ads. You can temporarily turn off Flash, which makes it go back to normal. Also, why would PDFs freeze things up?...the plugin opens fine in my browser, at least. It'll be slow if it's huge, but that's to be expected. In general, I find that IE (any version) and FF (at least the more recent versions) are way slower than anything else in existence. Even Opera is fine in terms of speed (although not always of accuracy). Web design efficiency has been steadily getting worse for quite some time now, so...avoid certain sites or get a better browser (or crack sites you don't like to send a message to the owner :)). Incidentally, Opera has a 'block content' feature which usually works quite well; I guess that could be used to certain effect.

Why on earth would they need Google Mini...and how could this possibly be a one-person job...

I would probably go for the first one, since it has '3D' in it. Then, when I saw that it was about WPF and Silverlight, I'd ditch it because I don't care about either of those. Lastly, I would go look for an alternative that used DirectX or something, not find it, and lose interest. I'm very interested in behind-the-scenes stuff, such as the Windows kernel and subsystems. It's just that the second item looks like meaningless jargon when I scan it- it needs a couple read-throughs before I understand what it actually says.