I don't remember the last time I used Safari on iOS, but once I started using Kagi, I was naturally drawn to Orion and that's been the best browser experienced I ever had on mobile.
The included ad-blocker being a big factor in the great UX.
That seems wild to me, but admittedly I don't search from the address bar at all. Is setting your preferred search engine as your homepage and opening a new tab to search really such a huge burden?
Yes. I do not tend to launch new tabs. I almost always use a single tab for browsing. Only when I need to keep something around then I launch a new tab to preserve the old one.
That means the address bar is my main interaction with the browser.