For myself (and I'd wager most people), I want to clear the URL and go to a totally different URL much more often than I want to manually manipulate the URL I'm

For myself (and I'd wager most people), I want to clear the URL and go to a totally different URL much more often than I want to manually manipulate the URL I'm currently on, so I like the change in default. Many casual users probably didn't even know a quick way to select the whole URL when it wasn't the default.