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The HN community is going to hate on me for this but it's partially their own fault for spending money trying to differentiate in the browser. They should just focus on Chromium. It's going to win anyway. Mozilla has a small market share percentage and eventually the gap is going to be large enough they will have to abandon the FF code base anyway. It's looking like they're going to focus more on the consumer market…
For what it's worth, I agree with you. Chromium has won. It's the "Linux kernel" of web browsers. However, that DOESN'T necessarily mean that every Linux user has to run Ubuntu! I recently switched from Firefox to Vivaldi. Just because: 1. I got tired of nagging compatibility issues with websites that I can't easily do with out (e.g. bank and stock broker). 2. I dabbled with Opera once upon a time, and liked it. I do…
Otherwise, it duplicates FF pretty well. Its obviously lacking in everything else "Firefox" like container support and DNS over HTTPS. Firefox is just a very fleshed out browser that is hard to replace. Vivaldi also shares standard Chromium browser flaws, such as being difficult to pass all of Cloudflare's security tests[0], when it's trivial in Firefox.
I agree with you that Gecko should be replaced with Blink, but another more popular perspective by a lot of hardcore nerds is that they like Gecko because new code carried over from Servo is written in Rust. Which has sifted out of the pile of new languages over the past 15 years as the real star.
Over the years I've pretty much written off everything except Firefox and native browers. FF for power users, native (Edge/Safari etc) for best system performance. Battery life is a killer feature in my book. There's too much missing in Vivaldi for me to move to it, if I ever throw in the towel on Firefox it'll be for Edge, but I'll be keeping tabs on Vivaldi.