Try doing a search for "foo.bar". When it's a run of non-spaces with a dot Firefox will never do a search and always try to interpret it as a URL. Chrome will instead search for the things it cannot resolve (at the very least don't tell me that no server could be found at something that doesn't even use a registered TLD).
Aah, yeah, it does do that. I can see that being annoying. And somewhat surprisingly, it doesn't fall back to search if you prefix with a space, so you're practically stuck adding a fake search term or some other annoying kludge...
Fwiw that has also been (generally) preferable for me: going to .local domains is a PITA on Chrome because it tries to search for it first.
You can start with ? (which works in IE and Chrome too to force a search), but then you first have to remove the www. that Firefox helpfully adds ;)
And agreed that Chrome is a little unhelpful there too; I always have to remember prefixing a non-domain hostname in our network with http://. Although by now I resorted to a bookmark.
