It irritates me no end that the Chrome developers refuse to implement this. (And yes, in googling around on the topic, I did come across a blog post by someone involved explaining that this is a design decision on their part and not an oversight.)

As a workaround, I'll open a subset of most active tabs in a second window. Tabs I am actively switching between as I'm doing my work.

Then, I'll end up closing the Windows in the wrong order and have the subset saved for restoration rather than the full set.

Please, Chrome devs, just make MRU tab switching an option, regardless of what you personally think about it. It is a common work occurrence to need to frequently switch between different pairs or small sets of tabs within a larger context of numerous references/tabs.

P.S. Extensions can't substitute the behavior, because a security measure -- so stated -- Chrome no longer allows browser default shortcut keys, e.g. Ctrl Tab, to be hooked and overridden.

P.P.S. I'd welcome suggestions for good substitutes that use a different key combination or another paradigm that's easy to tolerate.

There's also one called Ctrl-Tab that does the same, and also allows you to alt-Q (or is it Ctrl-Q) to give you thumbnails of all open tabs, then switch to tab by name (Emacs iswitchb style).