Comment 75 for bug 691380

I tried it, and ineed you can select what the GLODA box does, if it performs global search or filtering only. This can be fully configured. Thus, you can use the field in the mail bar only as local filter without global search.

And actually when you start typing in the search field the tab bar with the quick search bar show up, just without the field for entering search terms.

Just try it and you will see that it can do what you want, except that it is very ugly that the quick search bar is used for setting filtering options, thus still wasting all that space...