@Ted - Could you please share your thoughts on this behavioural change request to match desktop chrome behavior ?

How are you getting an IME w/ a physical keyboard?

Having ESCAPE reset the url to the initial editing state seems reasonable though.

ToolbarManager already has a couple APIs that should do this:
revertLocationBarChanges followed by setUrlBarFocus(true).  That "should" do what desktop does.  Granted, there first needs to be checks that the omnibox does indeed currently have focus, but this seems ok to me.

Even though physical KB is connected, when we "touch" on Url bar, IME comes. But in this scenario, IME invoking has less significance. What I wanted to point is about ESCAPE key behavior on Url bar.

Thank you for pointing about those APIs for making the required behavior. I will make a patch and proceed with the review.

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/8a5629f03b20a4a94a9653b11284f29534ebf49d

commit 8a5629f03b20a4a94a9653b11284f29534ebf49d
Author: ajith.v <ajith.v@chromium.org>
Date: Sat Sep 03 10:09:42 2016

Making Android Url bar behavior to ESCAPE key same as in Desktop Chrome

In response to ESCAPE key desktop chrome is selecting all the contents
of Url bar. Making same behavior in Android Chrome as well.

BUG= 631075 

Review-Url: https://codereview.chromium.org/2211433002
Cr-Commit-Position: refs/heads/master@{#416452}

[modify] https://crrev.com/8a5629f03b20a4a94a9653b11284f29534ebf49d/chrome/android/java/src/org/chromium/chrome/browser/KeyboardShortcuts.java
[modify] https://crrev.com/8a5629f03b20a4a94a9653b11284f29534ebf49d/chrome/android/java/src/org/chromium/chrome/browser/omnibox/LocationBarLayout.java