Yes, not only is Vivaldi “just” patches on the Google chromium code, they are implicitly limited in what they can patch because they need to be able to port their patches to newer versions of Chromium in order to inherit all of the security features and continued compatibility with the chrome web store. The design and features of Vivaldi are necessarily heavily dictated by Google’s decisions.
I’ve been using Vivaldi’s features (like the mouse gestures and a few other things) since its release. Would it be hard to migrate it all to Firefox or is there a better alternative?
Not really, chromium is mostly maintained by Google. They could fork it but that wouldn’t solve what I’m concerned about here
Does this mean Vivaldi devs have to constantly deal with what Google devs are doing? I was under the impression it’s a platform of their own.
Yes, not only is Vivaldi “just” patches on the Google chromium code, they are implicitly limited in what they can patch because they need to be able to port their patches to newer versions of Chromium in order to inherit all of the security features and continued compatibility with the chrome web store. The design and features of Vivaldi are necessarily heavily dictated by Google’s decisions.
I’ve been using Vivaldi’s features (like the mouse gestures and a few other things) since its release. Would it be hard to migrate it all to Firefox or is there a better alternative?
Possible, yes. Hard? Probably also yes. There’s a lot of addons for Firefox but I don’t use gestures so I have no idea.