> They changed it to behave like one other program: Chrome.

Oh man, I recently had the displeasure of using Chrome on someone else's computer and was driven absolutely insane by that behavior-- it made it extremely hard to edit a url.

Do you have any idea what the justification for this behavior is? (surely it's not just "be like chrome")

The justification that the most common task when clicking the address bar is typing a new one. Now it's just one click -> type new url. I love it, there was a about tweak you could do to get this before that I had to do over and over on every new new FF install. They made the right choice making this a default.

As for editing a url: just double click the part you want to change, then type to change it.

Interesting. I think I edit urls many times more often then I type one.

> Do you have any idea what the justification for this behavior is?

I don't know, but I would hazard a guess that the most common action in the URL bar is to copy the URL to paste elsewhere. Highlighting the text automatically gives the user the opportunity to immediately hit Ctrl-C. I think it's an improvement.

> Double-click selected everything while normally it would select a word.

In Firefox 75 on MacOS, double-clicking in the address bar selects a word.

I think it was Linux-only.

Do you have the URL and search bar separated or the same input box like Chrome? I've got them as separate input boxes and text selection still works with a single click for the whole URL string.

> It never acted like any other program. Double-click selected everything while normally it would select a word.

Maybe, but at least a single click (in Firefox 74) brought a text caret to type at a location, just like any other GTK text box on my system.

> They changed it to behave like one other program: Chrome.

If I wanted Chrome's bizarro NIH-induced UI fantasies, I'd use Chrome. I like that Firefox had a semblance of sanity and consistency with the rest of the world (even if not perfect).