Well, personally, I prefer Chrome. It's fast. It's simple. And it's nothing more or less than that. The moment you install it - it just runs for less than a second. Even with the plugins I have installed(fb, adblock and tab saver), it's still as fast.
I don't like FF, because you have to disable tons of stuff to make it work as fast as Chrome.
Hate Opera, because the one time I installed, it was so damn slow, that you can't imagine. And support is not as for FF or Chrome. It's much harder to find out how to optimize it. I only tried to find out, but got bored pretty quickly, and went back to Chrome.
Sure, Chrome does affect the work of your comp after running a while (I mean hours and hours of not closing it). But FF is even worse in that aspect. Can't speak for Opera here, cause I got rid of it pretty quickly - sure, it had a nice looking and inviting interface, but the truth behind it made me move on.
I'm not even going to talk about IE.
That's pretty much how I see things. And about this 'Google spying' paranoia - you're just making yourself look silly.