There are some subtle animation tweaks that we are going to for Photon to the Awesomebar. Highlighting of the hovered row, animating the identity block to a search glass, and animating the size of the popup if it shrinks or expands with changes to the contents. See the attached MP4 for a demo of what it should look like.

At 0m8s we can see "netflix.com/browse" and "http://mozilla.app.box.com". This is exactly the cool stuff we want <3. (neutral encryption: a hidden "https://" on wired.com at the beginning of the video) There may be an inconsistency: Currently your example shows an implemented bug 1158191. I thought bug 1002724 would come as a first step. What would happen if I would click on "bold.pixel.com/ Visit" or had typed in www.from-a-billboard.example? I would expect a connection over https here. As an interim solution you could show a grey http at the beginning. "http://[...] Visit" Maybe with a pref "network.https.tryfirst" in the context of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1002724#c35 to change it to the currently shown behavior?

Good catch! This bug is only about the animation seen in the video. I'm not don't know who is/isn't working on or if these other things you may see in the video are being worked on right now.

Just a quick note here: there's been a lot that has been changing (and still is) with regards to search, so this should definitely go through another round of design/sanity check before we start to build it.