Waterfox is dependant on Firefox still being developed. Mozilla are adding these features to try to stay relevant and keep or gain market share. If this fails, and Firefox goes away, Waterfox is unlikely to survive.
If firefox really completely fails, and nobody is able to continue the open source project, I'll just find a new browser. That's not a huge hassle- Waterfox does what I need in the here and now, that's my only criterion.
The problem is that if Firefox dies, there are no browsers left. I don't want to use a re-skin of Chrome.
Lynx is still not a re-skin of Chrome, unless I missed something changing.