There are firefox extensions that turn it into a normal entry box, although personally I love the awesome bar. I can't switch to any other browser now because I hate having to type out the whole url all the time. I can just type "hac" in my toolbar to go to hacker news.
FYI, in IE8, typing "hac" in the url bar sends you to a google search on "hac". In Safari, you end up at http://hac.com.
I can already do this with Firefox 2.0 (Firefox 3.0 from the Ubuntu repository crashed for me when I installed a new version of Ubuntu so I had to downgrade Firefox).
FYI, in IE8, typing "hac" in the url bar sends you to a google search on "hac". In Safari, you end up at http://hac.com.