Google Chrome nailed it in my opinion with the address bar. It’s a typical address bar, but if you type something there that is not an URL, it guesses that you want to search it. Perfect! I find myself frustrated with Firefox, Safari and other browsers when I get errors after typing my search in the address bar.
In Firefox at least, it’s easy to get the search bar to work that way. I found this page offers a great walk through. It’s a quick 1 or 2 min tweak, and it uses Google as the fall back search.
After yo apply the tweak, you can totally remove the search bar from the Firefox interface in the top right.