(1) View >> Toolbars >> Customize

(2) Drag your search box out of the bar

(3) Okay

(4) Go to any search engine. For example, go to google.

(5) Right-click in the search box, and choose "Add Keyword for this search"

(6) Give it a friendly name. For a google search keyword, I might suggest "g".

Now, when you want to search in Firefox's single URL bar, you can type "g cute cat pictures". Add the "cpan" search keyword for the search.cpan.org box, and in the same bar, you can type "cpan Moose". Want to define a word? Set up a keyword for the box at dictionary.com (Would "d" work for you?).

Also, Firefox has NoScript and supports the latest version of JavaScript (Chrome is years behind).

Any term you type into the URL bar that Firefox doesn't recognize as a URL will default to a google search. I actually edited this in about:config to default to a secure google search rather than a basic google search.

If you want to get more advanced, you can set keywords to perform custom searches. I have mine set so that typing "w <string>" will search for the Wikipedia article. I use several others "i <string>" for image search, "n <string>" for news, "d <string>" for definitions, and so on. They're easy to set up.