Qualanqui
I agree with you, I’d love to live in the world where Vivaldi chose Gecko instead of Chromium, but we’ve only got the cards we’ve been dealt so at least the Vivaldi team are always very vocal about this and have always said they’re going to work around Google’s more draconian decisions.
Just goes to show, google is an ad company first and foremost and they’re in the process of cutting out any competition to their dominance.
Props too to Vivaldi for blowing the whistle as they have access to all the upcoming chromium builds being a fork.
No love for Iain M Banks? The Culture series looks like it will tick all your boxes and instead of following a single protagonist the Culture itself is the protagonist so each book has it’s own cast of interesting characters.