From the website, it appears Awesomium is a UI library then a web browser building toolkit.
That said, there could be loads of stuff that a browser does than making HTTP requests and handing response, do you want to do all that? I don't think so.
Also, if you are making your own web browser, then why would you use IE?
If your intention is to be able to make calls to a web page/site and get the response stream using VB then look at this one, it has a sample code as well.
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/456dfw4f(v=vs.110).aspx?cs-save-lang=1&cs-lang=vb#code-snippet-15[
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