I'm unsure about other browsers but Firefox has "find as you type" functionality built. It allows to search the current webpage by simply starting to type. If the typed text matches a link, one can press enter to follow it. This feature makes navigating and searching the current page a breeze and can greatly speed up your web browsing in general.
Here are settings related to the feature:
To enable it from about:config, you want to set accessibility.typeaheadfind to true. The timeout after which the search bar disappears again is set as number of milliseconds in accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout. The default of 5000 milliseconds might be excessive if you do not want the bar to be in the way during browsing. I'm very happy with 1500 for that which gives 1.5 seconds after the last keystroke to e.g. start editing the search string before the search bar disappears again.
Edit: it looks like you can enable typeaheadfind in the preferences nowadays. Tweaking the timeout still requires going to about:config, though.
I believe that you can trigger this with the forward-slash key, and close the bar with Enter, if you prefer not to have every keypress trigger a search.
The only time that it is inconvenient to have it enabled all the time is when a page wants to react to some keys in which case I need to manually disable it. I do not like to have to press a key to start searching during normal web browsing as "/" requires either two keys or reaching for the number pad in my keyboard layout, making it no better than Ctrl+F in my opinion (something, something, "Falsehoods programmers believe about keyboard layouts/shortcuts"? ;) See also [0]).
It is simply a personal preference, I guess.
Here are settings related to the feature:
To enable it from about:config, you want to set accessibility.typeaheadfind to true. The timeout after which the search bar disappears again is set as number of milliseconds in accessibility.typeaheadfind.timeout. The default of 5000 milliseconds might be excessive if you do not want the bar to be in the way during browsing. I'm very happy with 1500 for that which gives 1.5 seconds after the last keystroke to e.g. start editing the search string before the search bar disappears again.
Edit: it looks like you can enable typeaheadfind in the preferences nowadays. Tweaking the timeout still requires going to about:config, though.