The action that the recent change to Firefox made harder is not any the actions you just described how to do, but placing the cursor at a point _within_ the URL. The recent change made it require a click to select the whole URL, a pause, and another click to place the cursor, instead of just a place to place the cursor.
I used to place the cursor inside the URL a lot and was disappointed when that action got slower. I was all set to give an example of why it’s bad, but right now, I’m actually having trouble thinking of such an example. I used to place the cursor inside a URL and then hit Shift-Command-Right to select the text after that, but I’ve just realized that clicking inside the URL and then dragging the mouse down is even faster. And I used to place the cursor near a section of the URL and use the keyboard to select and delete it, but double-clicking and dragging seems to take a similar amount of time in the examples I can think of.
Hmm… okay, I’ve thought of a good use-case for placing the cursor inside the URL: adding a subdomain. If I’m developing http://example.com/foo and want to go to the staging server http://staging.example.com/foo, I used to be able to click before “example” and type “staging.”. Now that requires two clicks and a pause, and the selection shortcuts above don’t help.
Thanks, I'm talking about the mouse, though. I do use these keyboard shortcuts all the time but that is sort of orthogonal to the changed click behavior -- which is unlike for any other text field on my system.
Then, if needs be, hit left arrow to move cursor to start of URL and deselect text. Hit right arrow to move to end of URL and deselect text.
Seems to be a standard keyboard shortcut across browsers. Works for me in Firefox, Yandex and Opera.