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.
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.