This was done deliberately after lots of user uproar - it used to auto select the contents of the URL bar AND set the primary selection. This meant that anytime

This was done deliberately after lots of user uproar - it used to auto select the contents of the URL bar AND set the primary selection. This meant that anytime you did anything with the URL bar, it would wipe your primary selection, which was pretty annoying. What Linux users wanted was for it to behave normally - i.e. not auto select, but set primary selection if you selected something in the URL. The auto select was apparently non-negotiable, so we ended up with the current compromise. It does set the primary selection if you manually select some/all of the URL though.