I mean, I like Firefox, but I’d love to see Vivaldi based on Firefox/Gecko. There’s Floorp, which is similar in some ways but it’s more like an Edge built on Firefox than Vivaldi.
Edit: Thank y’all for your answers. :D
I want to link !@bdonvr@thelemmy.club 's post because it is a similar quesion. https://thelemmy.club/post/718914
Gecko was pretty shit performance wise until Firefox quantum in 2017. Back then even Apple decided it’s better to use webkit for it’s browser.
It’s difficult to say exact reasons for each browser. But for Chrome enjoying the dominant position before that, it was better to jump on Chromium as base just for better compatibility with most websites.
Tooling followed soon after
Apple didn’t “decide it’s better to use webkit”, they MADE WebKit (from forking KDE). Back when they started WebKit Gecko was only out for a year and heavily associated with Netscape, while KDE’s was already mature