Taiwan at the time was very close to Japan, China and Korea which for the Europeans was a great place for trading. So it probably would have been valuable to the Europeans. I am aware that the Dutch tried to set up colonies but left and it failed. But later on other colonial powers like the Spanish who already had a colony in the Philippians, the British who just liked stuff and also had colonies and even the French who had Indochina. Especially the UK, they had lots of influence on China who were probably to weak to kick out the British out of Taiwan considering that they were in the "century of humiliation". Even Germany could have temporarily obtained it as they seemed to like having colonies in the pacific and no one else had Taiwan (from a European perspective). I don't see many disadvantages for the European powers to colonize Taiwan but they didn't really colonize Taiwan did they? As far as i'm aware the British, French, Germans or Spanish didn't even try to colonize Taiwan. Why?
The Dutch began their colonisation of Taiwan in 1624, in the south. Spain began their colonisation of Taiwan in 1626, in the north. Spain and the Netherlands being at war, this wasn't going to last forever. In 1641, the Dutch tried to take Spanish Taiwan for themselves, and failed. Happily for them, the Spanish cooperated, and moved most of their troops on Taiwan to the Philippines, to fight there. When the Dutch tried again in 1642, they defeated the Spanish in a few days, and became the sole colonial master of Taiwan. A few years later, Spain officially ceded Taiwan to the Dutch.
Enter China. Chinese settlers had been (illegally) moving from Fujian to Taiwan for some time, and had become Dutch colonial subjects. China was distracted, and had ignored events in Taiwan - Ming China had been fighting the Qing on their northern border. In the 1640s, the Ming government collapsed in the midst of famine, plague, and rebellion. A rebel army took Beijing, the Ming emperor committed suicide, and the rebel leader proclaimed himself emperor. Ming forces on the Great Wall, defending against the Qing, joined forces with the Qing to liberate Beijing. With Qing forces in Beijing, the Qing Dynasty officially became the rulers of China in 1644. They would need another two decades to conquer the rest of China.
The Ming promptly crowned a new emperor of their own (at first, they crowned two, on opposite sides of China), and fought the Qing. Fujianese merchant and pirate Zheng Zhilong was one of their generals. he surrendered to the Qing in 1647, but his son Zheng Chenggong continued the fight. Zheng Chenggong, better known in the West by his Ming title of Koxinga, inherited his father's pirate empire. His attempt to recover Nanjing for the Ming failed, and the Qing armies eroded his remaining hold on the mainland. His close-offshore island bases were not safe from the Qing, so he looked for a more secure base. He saw such a base in Taiwan. He was familiar with Dutch ways of war; his father, in his role as pirate-suppressor for the Ming, had fought and defeated a coalition of Chinese pirates and the Dutch. He took his forces to Taiwan in 1661, defeated the Dutch naval forces, and settled down for the siege of Fort Zeelandia. In 1662, he became the new ruler of Taiwan. He next raided the Philippines, and planned to add them to his empire. This plan was stopped by his death, probably from malaria.
In 1683, taking advantage of succession disputes after the death of Zheng Jing, Koxinga's son and successor as king of Taiwan , in 1682, the Qing took over Taiwan.
After this, any European power would have to defeat the Qing, and commit a large enough force to take and garrison Taiwan. The Western colonial powers wanted to trade with China - trying to take Taiwan would not make the Qing government cooperative. The Qing were willing to grant the trading concessions the West wanted in the mid-19th century because they didn't need to give much. Hong Kong was of little value to them, and they were willing to cede it to Britain. They would have fought much harder for Taiwan, and would have been less likely to grant the trade concessions the West was after. Trying to hold Taiwan might have been expensive, too. The US lost about 5,000 dead in a few years in the Philippines (with most of those deaths from disease), a large number compared with the normal peacetime strength of the US Army of about 25,000 men.
In the end, Taiwan did become a foreign colony, ceded to Japan in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War. Japan was a predatory and expansionist colonial power in a way that the Western powers were not, at least as far as China was concerned. Taiwan suited Japanese colonial aims, and they were prepared to control it. Taiwan was not the main goal of the First Sino-Japanese War; the main goal was Korea, and they achieved the expulsion of the Qing from Korea, as a first step to their soon-to-come colonial control of Korea. Japan continued to expand, taking Manchuria, and trying to take over Mongolia as well (getting smacked about by the Soviet Union at Khalkhin Gol/Nomonhan as a result). The outcome of Japan's colonial ambitions can be read as a cautionary tale: never get bogged down in a land war in Asia. Japan's colonial ambitions led to the Second Sino-Japanese War, and unable to win and unwilling to give up their conquest of China, they expanded the war to fight Britain, the Netherlands, and the USA. Despite Japan's hopes, this expansion of the war didn't lead to their conquest of China.