I switched to Vivaldi from Chrome earlier this year as I was uncomfortable with the level of Google integration in that browser.

Vivaldi is based on Chromium and has lots of improvements over Chrome, like gestures out of the box, side panels, lots of clear options. And Chrome extensions work perfectly. I've had no issues so far.

The complexity of managing a browser engine that does what everyone expects requires humongous resources so I can understand the move to Chromium. As long as the google bits are removed and the extensions work, it's great to have an alternative to Edge and Chrome.

I mostly use Firefox as my daily browser and nothing would make me abandon it but it's nice to be able to segregate your various professional/private persona using different browsers.