[ubercow13]

Firefox's omnibox is probably my favourite feature, it's so much better than separate bars. The reason is that it also searches within your bookmarks and history for items matching the terms you enter. At least half the time when I use the location bar, I am looking for a site I have been to before or bookmarked, and it will pop up as the first result in the suggestions. If nothing is found, it makes sense to fall back to a web search a lot of the time. How would this work with separate bars? Surely the history should be searched when typing in the location bar, but then you couldn't fall back to searching the web. Also, when looking for that site in my history, I might be typing part of the URL or part of the page title, so it is ambiguous whether it's a URL or search. Even if I am typing part of the URL, if it turns out nothing is found in my history, it might make sense to continue with the same terms as a web search instead of me trying to remember or form a whole URL from memory.

Chrome's implementation is terrible as it's designed to just funnel you into Google search, and doesn't give you a good idea of how useful it can be.

[elric]

I agree that that's the least painful implementation. But last time I tried FF mobile, the behaviour had changed and it was giving me search suggestions (as in actively contacting a search engine as I was typing), with no way to turn it off. That's a deal breaker for me.

If I want to search in just my history, I can simply press CTRL-H and type to search in history.