Firefox 31, just released to Mozilla's beta channel, apes Chrome by pushing search in another UI location.
Computerworld - Mozilla has pulled a "Chrome" by adding a search box to the new tab page in Firefox 31, which reached beta status yesterday and is slated to ship in final form on July 22.
Along with the nine thumbnails representing the user's most-frequently-visited websites, the new tab page in Firefox 31's beta sports a search field near the top of the window. Typing a search string in the box initiates a search on Google, unless the user has changed the default search engine. If the Firefox user has changed the search engine -- say, to Yahoo or Microsoft's Bing -- that choice is also used in the new tab page's search box.
"We know that many users don't know/use the search field in the UI or the Awesome Bar," wrote Philipp Sackl, a senior interaction designer at Mozilla, in the first entry on a Bugzilla thread that kicked off the change in January. "Providing a search field on the new tab page would make their search experience more fluid."
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And since this version is still in Beta the reason it's posted here!
Daniel