That's funny, I couldn't stand to use Firefox (which I only do rarely for development) until I found out about a plugin that combines the address and search bar.
My favorite feature in Firefox (aside from deeper extensions) is keyword searching.
I can right-click a search field, bookmark it with a simple title e.g. wiki, g, i, imdb and then search from the address bar by typing the keyword and then the query.
I like this method because it is reliable and doesn't change the look of the address bar. I use Chrome about 25% of the time on Windows and the thing with searching different sites from a blank tab is that it is unreliable for me.
Preferences > Manage Search Engines... will do the same thing in Chrome (though it doesn't have the wonderful right-click-to-add ability; you have to enter the URL yourself).
They get added automatically as soon as you use a search box, just change the keyword to something shorter than the domain name (which is the default keyword).
I used to do this in Firefox (before Chrome came out), and I thought it was great. Then, I switched to Chrome (simply because it was significantly snappier) and quickly realized that just Googling everything directly from the Chrome bar was almost always as good as all those specific shortcuts I had setup in Firefox.
