I agree.
There exists a ActiveX-control of gecko :
http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm
It resembles most of the interfaces and the most importand DOM.
The dom is however not compleetely compatible, and forseeable never will be.
It's importand to also be able to embed ActiveX-controls, which is the
project you mentioned. AFAIK this is accomplished by these projects.
Technically it happens the following:
COM-objects (=ActiceX-control) have to be recistered via an GUID in
Registry to be found. There is essentally a link from an interface GUID
to a DLL. Since the gecko ActiveX-Control implements the same Interface
as IE, there's no problem. There should however be a dedicated GUID for
gecko (which is the case) (to instantiate gecko explicitely).
So installing IE on ROS would overwrite the GUID ant make it point to an
IE-dll.
What we still need is a browser interface (GUI). Firebird can make this
part. There can however also be some kind of ActiveX-Container like
IEXPLORE.EXE is. I don't care about that.
In order to reduce redundancy (not two geckos on one system) either
firebird should exist in a ROS-version or ROS should provide an
ActiveX-container.
A ROSified Firebird could for example provide also the Mozilla ActiveX
Control and update it. This would imply that we have a talk at
Mozilla.org and invite them in our plans (which I would suggest)