The One Box

Internet Explorer team lead Dean Hachamovitch used to criticize Chrome's use of a combined address and search box, citing privacy concerns, but IE9 now has a single text box for addresses and search, too, called the One Box. Hachamovitch told me that IE9's version adds privacy, by letting you turn on an off the autosuggest feature of your search engine at will.

The IE9 One Box doesn't offer Chrome's brilliant Instant feature, which loads previously visited sites before you even finish typing their address, but at least it lets you choose among search providers at the bottom of its dropdown suggestions.

One welcome behavior of the One Box is that after you enter a search and get your result page, the box doesn't switch to a URL, but instead your search terms remain there, in case you want to further refine it. And unlike in the IE9 beta, you can now enter searches like "site:site domain" into the One Box to limit results to a specific site.