I rarely go to a a search engines homepage to run a search. It is just much more convenient, and is a habit, for me to search right from the toolbar. When I used IE, that meant the Google toolbar, and that meant searching in Google. When I switched to Firefox, I got rid of the toolbar, and used the built-in search bar for searching, and a PR plugin for viewing PageRank. The searchbar on Firefox can be used by many search engines with the use of simple plugins, but until now there were no plugins for MSN Search Beta.
Sidenote as quoted from Mycroft: A search plug-in allows you to access a search engine right from your browser, without having to go to the engine's page first. On Mozilla 1.x, you can access plugins via the Sidebar or the Location Bar. On Mozilla Firefox (formerly known as Firebird), you use the search box on the toolbar.
As reported on the msnSearch Weblog, Ryan has created a plugin for MSN beta search for Firefox. This is great. One click installs the plugin, and you can then search MSN beta right from the search bar. It shouldnt be long before someone somewhere creates all the tools we have become accustomed to using for the new MSN beta search.