Parent post didn't expliticly ask for browser context only.
Mitm attacks seem incredibly dangerous in a package repo. Signing only gets you so far - and they probably don’t protect you from downgrade attacks.
There's no benefit to saving a file on a floppy disk, but if I tell my computer to copy a file to my floppy drive, I don't expect it to say "No, can't do that. You should be using a USB flash drive--they're better in all ways!"
But I'm asking you: Why do you want to use unencrypted HTTP? Surely there must be some reason you want to do that, right? You (and others) clearly care a lot about this. I'm sure you're not an idiot. Help me understand your point of view here?
At the end of the day, I worked around all of this browser helpfulness by using Firefox and re-enabling TLS 1.1 in Firefox's settings. I never actually managed to force any browser to use http:// despite trying many proposed solutions in this thread and on the web.
But all that aside, it doesn't really matter why I want to use unencrypted HTTP. I am commanding my computer to do it, and I expect it to carry out my command. My computer is a tool. It should do what I want it to do, even if that might hurt me. If I type in sudo rm -rf /usr, I expect it to do what I tell it to do. Not ask "Why do you want to do that?"