> 1. It would be better to make "Quick search" a placeholder

Do you mean in addition to the "Quick search" text that is already on the page or do you want to remove that? Because placeholder isn't fully compatible with some older browsers http://caniuse.com/#feat=input-placeholder

> 2. <li class="right"> will add an unnecessary border in search page. I'd change it to

Good idea, will fix this.

> may cause weird compatibility problems in some (old?) browsers.

What problems are you thinking of? I think `display: inline` is the right choice here since we want the inputs to inherit the height of the header. The page renders fine on all versions of IE from my testing.

Also, newer versions of sphinx come with a newer jquery that breaks compatibility with IE8 which would cause the search box to not appear anyway.

>Is there a way to send this to upstream Sphinx?

I don't think so, it's one of those things that make sense as a theme, which is perfect since we have our own sphinx theme anyway.