Summary from bug 993792 "From an UX perspective, I have a slight preference over highlighting the URL bar instead of opening about:home. But since we already fixed bug 940685, and are working on bug 612453, opening about:home is an equivalent good option." I'm filing this bug so that engineering can prioritize whether to move forward with the change or not.

If we prefill the location bar with "?" in this case, we can make single-word searches work...

I would prefer we go back to the old behaviour like Bryan proposed in bug 993792 comment 16 and load the homepage of the search engine so that the features of that engine are available immediately.

I think we're going to stick with the status quo.