But that's the fault of Firefox.
I'm always astonished how bad/slow the mobile web experience is without Ublock with JS blocked by default.
There are some quirks though, minor annoyances that every so often get introduced in updates. For example, when closing the last private browsing tab it doesn't automatically show the regular tabs any more, but instead requires three more taps. But I'm happy to ignore those for the sole reason of having fully functional ad-blocking.
If you have a good keyboard, you can even use DDG !bang syntax. I find this very helpful for finding what I want fast.
Which phone / OS do you use?
Btw, to search for something I open Firefox and type in the URL bar.
How? Is there a hidden about:config?
For example, I prefer the address bar at the top. Firefox doesn't like that, so the new tab button stays on the bottom, meaning I have a six inch stretch between where my finger was to hit the tab manager and where it has to go to open a new tab. It's full of little things like that where the only explanation that comes to mind is that Mozilla decided they couldn't do it the best way because Chrome was already doing it that way.