Personally, I dont like some of the ideas here
I hate removing the control box.
I find record selectors extremely useful.
I hate not having a close button - on the odd forms I have removed them for special reasons, I still find it awkward looking for the close mechanism on those forms.
And I hate the binoculars icon and usage - so generally I lock the important fields that users might change, thinking they were navigation options, but provide a separate search box mechanism that simplifies the use of the binocular search mechanism.