At least Firefox still lets you put back a dedicated search box

On my Firefox 79, if I pop open a new tab, 1) the cursor is refocused from the search box to the URL bar and 2) the URL bar is a search box (even if search-in-url-box is successfully disabled in not-new tabs).

Even better, the option to set new tab to a webpage is gone. The only choices are the Firefox default page or a blank webpage.

Normally this wouldn't be a problem. I'd just try one of the dozen of known tweaks to about:config or userChrome.css and defeat this behavior. Except none of them impact this.

Again, this is only for a new tab.

Ew, yeah, that's a pain.

FWIW, and as a workaround and not any sort of defense of FF breaking itself: You could, from an existing page, type what you want in the search box, then middle-click (or ctrl+click) the search button, which opens the result in a new tab. Again, you shouldn't have to do this, but it seems like it'd patch your workflow.

In the end I opted for an extension - it redirects a new tab to a web page of my choosing.

The action is a bit distracting but it happens fast enough that it's not a bother.

I'll note it was the 2nd extension I tried. It may be some onerous Firefox security measure needs to be bypassed & the first extension hadn't managed it yet.

It used to be two different boxes in Opera. Early Firefox or IE didn’t have a search box.

Firefox 1.0 had a search box, see the screenshot at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_early_version_history#...