The cited support thread is 4 1/2 years old and was filed on a pre-release Beta version of Firefox. According to this support page - Keyboard Shortcuts - Search > Foucus Search Bar - {Ctrl + E} and {Ctrl + K} - are the current shortcuts on Windows.

So if you have that problem with the current version of Firefox, you have something else going on. See what happens in the Firefox SafeMode.

On Windows 7, Ctrl+e works for me. In addition to Add-ons, two other things come to mind:

• Websites can intercept keyboard shortcuts for their own purposes, for example, assigning Ctrl+s to saving your work in the site instead of Firefox's Save Page As feature. But you then would find Ctrl+e to work on most sites and fail on just a few.

• Plugins can intercept keyboard input in you have used their controls or otherwise interacted with them. Try clicking on the page outside of the plugin area (e.g., outside the video player) in this case to redirect the keyboard to Firefox.

What Firefox locale (user interface language) do you use?

- I don't have any add-on installed. - My Firefox locale is default - English.

Does Ctrl+K work to set focus to the search bar?

Try to open a new window in case there is a problem with the current window.

After once starting in safe mode, I am able to put focus to search bar with both the shortcuts, not sure what happened.

Ctrl + E and Ctrl + K both take to search bar :)