You don't have to use Chrome, Chromium works as well and I don't believe it shares data with Google.
Also while I'm not a huge fan of lots of small unreadable tabs, I'm not really a fan of scrolling tabs either, it just seems so slow. I typically just group like tabs into their own windows and it isn't really much of an issue anymore.
The only reason I don't use Chrome is because of the Google info sharing. Chromium is unclear as to weather it actually shares data or not. I believe at one point there was a bug where it was definitely connecting to googles servers. I believe they fixed it, but it was enough to keep me on Firefox.
Also while I'm not a huge fan of lots of small unreadable tabs, I'm not really a fan of scrolling tabs either, it just seems so slow. I typically just group like tabs into their own windows and it isn't really much of an issue anymore.