Currently the "Browser" bookmark on the homescreen for the system browser uses a hack in the "features" property to tell the system app to display the browser start page in a SearchWindow instead of opening a WrapperWindow. This was implemented in bug 992884 and works by the Rocketbar telling the search app to display the start page using an IAC message. This kind of sucks as it makes the system app more tightly coupled with the search app and uses a hack especially for the "browser app" which no other bookmark could use. I suggested an alternative approach where the Browser icon is just a bookmark to app://search.gaiamobile.org/start.html which could be opened in an AppWindow, but it was decided to go ahead with the hacky solution first and fix it in a follow-up. We don't currently support bookmarking a particular page of an app, we can only launch apps at their launch path. I filed bug 996039 for the general case of hyperlinking to pages of apps, but for this bug I don't think we'd need to implement all of that. Making the start page just a bookmark to a page in an app would seem much cleaner than the current approach.

An alternative is that we just add the search app to the homescreen and call it "Browser". Then it would be much like the current browser app (with a start page and awesomescreen), but with the address bar moved outside the app!

Are you tracking this work somewhere else now or should we keep this bug open?

Working on it in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1041620