However, the status bar is no longer persistent, but only appears when hovering over a link. Also in the past you used to be able to control the text in the status bar via the window.status variable in JavaScript. This was disabled as it was used for malicious purposes (faking link destinations and misleading users by putting page-controlled content in the browser chrome), and after that there didn’t seem much point to wasting 20–30px of precious vertical space all the time.

I would also note that the address bar and search box got merged for a good reason, because their functionalities steadily converged over time as the address bar became more powerful and useful. You can still have them split if you really want, but it is unlikely to actually benefit most people.