Now they only need instant tab search, like Chrome does with Ctrl+Shift+A. It's like the last thing I'm personally missing before I can actually make Firefox my primary browser. Chrome's tab search is so damn good for navigating in a big tab jungle, it's one of my favorite and most used features of the browser.
Not sure how it compares to chrome but firefox does have a solid open tab search.
You can either click "list all tabs" button (down arrow to the right of the new tab button) and then "search tabs" or enter "%" as the first character in the address bar followed by your search term.
As far as I know there is no keyboard shortcut for it.
Yeah, I know about that. It's unfortunately not as snappy or usable as Chrome's, because you can't activate the search with a single key combination. The item focus behavior is also distracting: when you type in your search, the best match is not automatically focused, so you have to press the down arrow key and then press enter to activate it. In Chrome, you just press Ctrl+Shift+A, type in the search, and press enter (99 % of the time). So for the whole process, Firefox has two extra steps. It ends up being a lot because I use this feature dozens of times in a day.
They changed the official named from "address bar" to "___location bar" ages ago when they added functionality like that, and to go with the new name, "ctrl + l" is a shortcut for it.
Netscape always called the url bar the "___location bar". "Address bar" is Internet Explorer's term. (At some point Netscape/Mozilla copied the ctrl+d shortcut for A_d_dress from IE as well.)