And lets hope that said IE in XUL code can be backported to a Firefox extension so we can have an ideal web developer tool without the hellish interface and spyware of Netscape.

Interesting, do you know where the Netscape 7 sources can be found ?

(From Alex: Surprisingly, a search on Google didn't turn it up. But I remember specifically an announcement on the old mozilla.org homepage that AOL was complying with the MPL in releasing the Netscape 7 source.)

I don't think Netscape ever released the source for the Netscape proprietry stuff (e.g AIM, Netscape mail support, etc) but there was always a release of mozilla that corresponded to the open source aspects of Netscape

IE engine is connected to Gecko through a normal Netscape Plugin API-compliant plugin (at least it was that in beta), called nptrident.dll (or sth like this)