*~* I also agree with this,
We should take Firebird (since its only the browser (not mail, IRC, composer, etc.) and its faster than IE) and add in the ActiveX control plug in (which you can get at: http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/plugin.htm) and also make a COM wrapper for the Gecko rendering engine, between those two we should have a full replacement to IE for the OS. I think that there was some Netscape employees working on making a COM wrapper for Mozilla, but I can't remember the website, and development seemed to be pretty inactive, but its better than starting from scratch.
*~*
No, no, I don't think you get what I'm suggesting. Both Mozilla and Firebird have the same engine under the hood. The speed difference is mostly because seamonkey loads more than just the browser. The ActiveX control is simply a way to access the browser, all of those other features are actually add-ons that don't need to be installed.
As for the dummy-browser, it's actually quite simple to do. I would if I better understood ActiveX, but the "official" website for the control has a variety of demos to work from. The dummy-browser would be a little bit more useful than just plain Firebird, since we could integrate bookmarking features with ros explorer much in the same way microsoft does with IE.
If modified properly, the control could replace IE completely. It wouldn't be needed for anything anymore.