I'm not sure if that's possible. You could just open a new tab, go to Google search, then search on that tab you just barely created.

I'm sorry to disappoint you but you could send feedback to Google about that idea. Go to the Google website, in the lower right hand corner click settings, then click "Send Feedback."

You could also send feedback to Mozilla about the idea for all search engines. It could be an optional thing to do in Firefox if they chose to implement that.

Is this the search bar on the Navigation Toolbar?

For that search bar you can toggle the browser.search.openintab to true on the about:config page.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/about:config

For the Google website you can do this via the Google search settings page.

• http://www.google.com/preferences?hl=en

It turns out there is an about:config setting just for this purpose. Toggle browser.search.openintab to 'true', and all is well.

Rick