My sites in Newark are up. The situation is not as alarming as the submission title would suggest. They've updated the status page to indicate that it is limited to an issue with DHCP.
I use Firefox Nightly on a MacBook (Retina) and it performs very well with WebRender on and gfx.compositor.glcontext.opaque set to TRUE. Faster than Safari even! Worse battery life though.
You're probably not going to have a good time trying to use a USB WLAN dongle as an access point. Even if you manage to track down a) if the driver supports AP mode, and b) put together a whole hostapd configration, you're still limited by the transmit power of the little thing, which I guarantee isn't a lot. Another thing is that acting as an AP is a lot more taxing on a piece of hardware than just acting as a client; there's a chance that the USB WLAN thing will be extra flaky and maybe even overheat.
Instead... just get something that will run OpenWRT. Check out this list: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/start. Running and configuring it at the command line is way more pleasant than you'd expect, and the (optional) web GUI is functional if inconsistent.
Fuck yeah, I wasn't aware of these projects. I thought the article was exceptionally good and I'm very pleased that there are people taking the initiative to actually do the hard work in search of resolution for the problems detailed. Thank you.