My wife just got a new MacBook Air. At the same time, she decided to switch to Safari after years of using Firefox. But something is driving her mad: when she types search terms into the address bar and hits Return, instead of doing a Google search, nothing happens. It says “Google Search” right there in the address bar, and search suggestions appear in the dropdown, but it doesn't matter how many times she presses Return, nothing happens.
I've never seen this happen before in all my years of using Safari. Some Googling suggested turning off Safari search suggestions in Preferences, but that didn't help. Any other ideas? She's running Safari version 14.1.2 on Big Sur, and has no extensions installed.