Home network installation on OSX (newbie)

I’m a complete WordPress newbie.

I have a wireless home network with three Macs running 10.2 (G2), 10.6 (MacBook), 10.8 (Mini). The last of these has computer name “Mini”, and I want to run WordPress on it. I also do 99% of my development work on that machine. I’ve installed the latest MySQL, latest PHP, and WordPress 4.0.

For my site name on the Mini, I have tried localhost, 127.0.0.1, mini.local, and 192.168.1.100. All four work. (Actually, of course, the full site name is something like https://mini.local/~myusername/mysitefolder/ .)

Which of those four choices, if any, is optimal? By “optimal”, I mean least likely to cause connectivity problems and least likely to have performance issues. I realize that there may be no discernible performance issues with any of these choices when the user and the server are on the same machine.

The last two site names partly work on the other machines, although NoScript ABE in Firefox on the MacBook prevents loading WordPress JavaScripts from mini.local. Pointers to documentation on ABE configuration would be appreciated.

Safari on the MacBook works with both mini.local and 192.168.1.100.

A related question: my wireless home router is also my Internet gateway. Should I activate and configure my OSX firewall on Mini to keep the outside world away from my WordPress site? If so, I’d appreciated pointers to documentation on that.

Thanks.