How do you see which tab is which? (I gave up on Chrome about 20 months ago for Firefox's superior tab handling, better stability, and being less of a resource hog. Oh, and for not spying on me.)
I use an extension called switch to tab. It uses the omnibox interface to auto complete what you type and switch to the right tab. (and when I'm switching back and forth multiple times between two tabs, I just have muscle memory for how many tabs apart they are).
What are you referring to specifically with the "spying on you" claim? I wasn't aware of any behavior like that other than features that you can turn off that end up sending info to Google servers (like tab sync).
Not GP, but:
multiple windows and intuition. Generally, for ~20 tabs per window I still can tell pretty okay what is what, only large swabs of similar tabs (e.g. 10 ebay product sites) are a bit annoying. A tab switcher that shows the headlines would admittedly be helpful.
In Firefox, I either scroll quickly though readable tabs with the mouse-wheel, or click the right down-arrow for a text list of tabs, or start typing in the address bar of whichever tab I'm in. For example, if I type twi then the drop-down list offers Twitter, and I select "Switch to tab". That gets me to the half-dozen tabs I want to look at several times a day.
With those options plus tab groups, I find it pretty easy to handle several hundred tabs in Firefox, where Chrome was a nightmare. The drawback is that you just keep adding tabs ;-)
What are you referring to specifically with the "spying on you" claim? I wasn't aware of any behavior like that other than features that you can turn off that end up sending info to Google servers (like tab sync).