How I Teleport through the Internet with Firefox

I’ve ranted and whined about Google Chrome before, so don’t worry–I won’t do it again. But one of my main issues with it was the “Omnibar”. The thing is: Firefox has a very powerful, reasonably intuitive set of bars, and I can teleport through the internet with them. Chrome just fell short of that standard.

So the question is: How do I do it?

Feel lucky: I search for a lot of things. But most of the time I don’t need multiple opinions–the first webpage I find will be good enough to answer the question of the moment. So I save time by typing my query into the address bar, not the search bar. This usually does an “I’m Feeling Lucky” Google search, and takes me to the #1 page. Good enough for me.
…but know when to search: This one’s pretty much a given–actually use the search bar. Ctrl-K will jump the cursor there, and Ctrl-<Arrow Keys> will navigate through the search engine being used. Having to go to an actual search engine’s website, click (or tab to) the search bar, and then actually query is a big waste of time.
Fine-tune your search engines:Clicking on the arrow by the search bar will let you “Manage Search Engines”. Trim the list of redundancies (I’ll give you a hint: You do not need Google, Yahoo and Ask. Pick one). Now the Ctrl-<Arrow Keys> is much more streamlined. Also know which ones to add–Manage Search Engines->Get more search engines will give you a list of popular ones to choose from. Also, if you’re at the actual website (i. e.: www.ninjawords.com) the search button will highlight, and you’ll be given the option of adding it right then and there.
Do the keywords: Back at the “Manage Search Engines” box, highlight a common-but-not-primary engine you use (Wikipedia for me) and give it a keyword (I used “w”) now prefixing your query in the address bar with that keyword will use the indicated search engine. This is even faster than the Ctrl-<Arrow Keys> method, especially when you know that Ctrl-L moves the cursor to the address bar.
Be awesome: The address bar, lovingly called the “Awesome Bar” by developers and fans alike, has made most of my bookmarks worthless. Use it frequently–it will know what page you’re after. To improve you success rate, try to use unique words. For example, when I was finding the link to my article “My Last Whine About Google Chrome”, I went with “whine” first–not “Google” or “Chrome” since I’ve been to a lot of websites with those words in the title. Whining? Not so common. Also incorporate the URL–if I want to see how the Digg page is doing, I’ll go “whine digg”. And if all I know is that I saw something cool on the NY Times–a site that I don’t frequent very often, but that did have a totally-awesome front-page-of-business-section article on Ubuntu, I’ll go “nytimes” to get the URL.