I also prefer them separate, but rather for ease of navigation. I use the address box as a form of "search my browsing history" to jump to pages that I've visited before, and it's convenient to keep that separate from the search box's own history and automatic suggestions. The fact that Chrome conflates these two concepts is its biggest turn-off to me.

If you're living in your awesomebar and don't already know them, you might want to check out our filters:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-find-your-b...

You can restrict location bar matches to bookmarks only, urls only, open tabs only, &c.

I don't know if it counts as an easter egg, but it makes my own life a lot easier.

My problem with conflating search and URL is

1) 1-word searches/domains or searches involving a domain-looking piece of text throw it off.

2) cluttering my typed-URL history with search keywords.

> 1) 1-word searches/domains or searches involving a domain-looking piece of text throw it off.

Example I always run into:

  site:news.ycombinator.com foo bar baz

"site" is an unknown protocol now, because it looks like a URL. I have to remember to put the search terms first.

... I never even thought of that. I always start with naive searches and then remember to add "site" refinements later as I mangle the search from the Google page, so I never actually try the "site:" qualifier right in the URL bar. That's a nasty one.

You can also press the down arrow button and press return as usual that gives the option to search even if what you type looks like a url to the browser. Also I just tried it and the default selection for what you quote is search not the url.

Just tried that (Firefox 25 on OSX). It didn't work. Down arrow does nothing, and there are no AwesomeBar matches, so there is no drop-down. Maybe you have some configuration option set?

Nope. When you type anything in the omnibox that chrome thinks is a url, it shows atleast 2 items in the dropdown one is go to url and other a search google for url. I can upload a screenshot when I am back home in a couple of hours.

Just put a question mark in front, and you shouldn't have an issue. I used to run into that problem all the time.

Not sure how it would work if you wanted to search Amazon or something...

Your example worked fine for me, and returned a list of search results from HN for me with the words 'foo' 'bar' and 'baz'.

Firefox 25 on OSX gives me:

  The address wasn't understood

  Firefox doesn't know how to open this address, because
  the protocol (site) isn't associated with any program.

  You might need to install other software to open this
  address.

Firefox 21 on Ubuntu was giving me the same thing, I don't think I've tried it on Firefox 25 on my Ubuntu install.

Ctrl-K will put a ? in front to indicate a search term.

I've never experienced this behavior in Firefox. The Ctrl-K (or Cmd-K on OSX) combination this this:

- If the Search Box is in the toolbar, it puts the focus in the Search Box.

- If the Search Box is not in the toolbar, it navigates to Google.com (at least when Google is selected as the default search).

Are you sure you're not getting this from an addon?

> 1) 1-word searches/domains or searches involving a domain-looking piece of text throw it off.

With DuckDuckGo, it's easy to prepend/append "!ddg" onto the offending text to force a search. I sometimes have to do this for arithmetic operations, the first operand of which the bar interprets as an address. For me, the small amount of extra time this takes is worth it. A unified search/URL bar, particularly with DDG's bang functionality, feels like a command line. And a command line feels like home.

!ddg is quite a few extra keystrokes though. Isn't it easier to just keep a shortcut key bound to that search? For example, I have 'g' bound for Google. The result:

  "blah blah"  -> Google: blah blah
  "blahblah"   -> attempts to find a host named blahblah
  "g blahblah" -> Google: blahblah

Depends whether you are a vi fan or not.

1) My feelings as well

2) Bothers me to an extent but since FF ranks by usage + weights naked domains higher in the awesomebar it isn't too big an issue.

On (2), that's good. I have a WP7 phone and it's terrible about typed URLs in the history... search words obliterate your typed URLs 90% of the time.

I've recently tried to switch back from chrome to Firefox but the persistent search thing really bugs me, as well as the fact that it doesn't always search when typing into the url bar.

If you want to get back so quickly there are recently closed, bookmarks, history and plenty of other ways. Always persisting the search term I find very visually distracting.

Edit: On the other hand, the current tab behaviour is more of an irritation. Middle clicking the tab closes the tab unless it's the last tab when it does nothing. This is irritating. Dragging a tab doesn't work well when that tab is maximised. In chrome if you have 2 windows both maximised it's easy to drag a tab from one window to the other. In firefox you have to make one window smaller first to do this.

I'm quite excited to find out if this new interface fixes this.

There is a not-so-well-known trick. Type % into the url bar and you can quickly navigate tabs opened. :)

To be specific, starting a search with a % searches only in open tabs. + searches tagged pages, * searches bookmarks, and ^ searches frequently-visited pages that aren't bookmarked.