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)