It looks like when the highlighting is turned off for the primary selection, due to a click in the same tab, the selection is also erased from PRIMARY (if that is what the selection clipboard is called in linux).

Chrome Version: (copy from chrome://version)
57.0.2970.0 (Official Build) dev (64-bit)
OS	Linux 
JavaScript	V8 5.7.376
Flash	24.0.0.194
Command Line	/usr/bin/google-chrome-unstable --user-data-dir=/usr/local/google/home/whesse/.config/google-chrome-unstable --flag-switches-begin --flag-switches-end
Executable Path	/opt/google/chrome-unstable/google-chrome-unstable

OS:  Linux Ubuntu 14.04 internal version.

What steps will reproduce the problem?
(1) Select text in a gmail window
(2) center-click in an edit window on the same page
(3) No text is pasted

 (4) select text
 (5) hit ctrl-c
 (6) click in an edit window and hit ctrl-v
 (7) the text is pasted

 (8) select text in a different tab or window
 (9) center-click in an edit box in gmail
 (10) the text is pasted

 (11) select text in the gmail tab
 (12) select text in another tab
 (13) center-click in an edit box in gmail
 (14) the text is not pasted

  Other experiments show that whenever selected text loses its highlighting, the selected text disappears from the clipboard and cannot be pasted with a center click.