I thought I would miss the search box when it disappeared but actually the "awesome bar" is pretty awesome :
You can disable search suggestions and it will only search your keywords in history/bookmarks/opened tabs and then you just tab into the list, else if there's nothing of interest in the list you can always press enter and it will launch a search in your default search engine. All that power accessible with just Ctrl + L, Tab and Enter.
You can also launch @search_engine $keyword directly in the bar, search bookmark/history/tabs directly with */^/% symbols.
You can't disable search suggestions on Chrome (I wonder why...)
This is the main reason I am still on Firefox despite the weird UI design choices... which can easily be fixed with that script :
https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix