I think the management’s recent decisions, as well as the removal/lack of power-user features for those users, have moved a lot of people away from Firefox, myself included. They really need to focus on providing really good software, not get caught up in trying to chase trends or forcing services people don’t want. This WIRED article does a good job explaining the issues.
I am keeping an eye on Pulse Browser, which is an experimental fork of Firefox with uBlock Origin pre-installed and some UI customisations. They’ve got a sidebar with “web panels” very much like Vivaldi’s Panels, and they’ve got vertical tabs like Edge. People also seem to be posting suggestions to their discussion page on GitHub. It’s early days, but if they listen and try to implement some of the suggested features to their best ability, it could be a much better Firefox than Firefox itself.
Edit: From Pulse’s Discord, I just found out Mozilla bought Fakespot and are integrating that into Firefox. Some people are definitely going to think that’s bloat.
Oh, I support Gecko. More browser engines to compete against Chromium the better. I just can’t use Firefox in its current state right now. Thankfully, Pulse seems to be picking up the slack in places.
Edit: I’ve thought about it a bit, and honestly, even if you choose a fork of Firefox, that still supports Firefox. If Brave, Vivaldi, Opera and Edge are all Chromium and that’s a reason that Chromium has flourished, the same will ring true for anything that forks Firefox. One of Pulse’s aims is to make tooling for building a Firefox-based browser easier, and their fork is part of that.