In Firefox, you could get rid of the address bar if you wanted. I've got mine set up kind of like the very old Internet Explorer (I don't know how to put a screen shot up, so I'll just tell you)
First I've got the Menu Bar
Then the toolbar with: Back, Forward, Home, Reload, Stop, Cut, Copy, Paste, Downloads, History, New Window
Then under that I've got the address bar
Then under that I've got my Yahoo toolbar installed which has the search bar on it.
It's all very tidy.
And I always found that IE kept freezing up on me - that's why I moved over to Firefox. Never get problems with it and it's faster than IE as well I think.