Everything old is new again. The first browser to do this was IE 6 (or maybe even 5). People didn't get it (it wasn't discoverable enough), and people complained that the browser was helping Microsoft spy on them.

Google only improved the UI a little and made Google the default instead of MSN search.

Agreed. When everyone was moving to Firefox because it was 'lighter weight', I stuck with the Mozilla suite because one of the things I liked was searching from the address bar. And this was years ago. It's ironic that the same people criticising the Mozilla browser for being 'clumsier' are now praising Chrome for being more streamlined.

IE5 had an add-in (a power toy I think) that allowed you to create a string as a shortcut to a search engine so you could type something like the following into the address field:

   g:foo

and do a google search for 'foo'.

this proofs why ui is important

To each his/her own. I prefer Firefox's ctrl-K for the search box. and get frustrated by Chrome's insistence on giving me search results for a domain I type in the address bar after I press ctrl-Enter to automatically asume a dot-com (shift-Enter for .net or ctrl-shift-Enter for .org).

I love Chrome's visual cues for in-page search results. If only they'd implement incremental search like Opera and Firefox (and Vim): '/'+search, instead of the more cumbersome c-F.

I remove the search bar in Firefox and just use the address bar for searches. It searches Google and if the result is popular enough it goes directly to that page.