Is there a way to get exactly this new Chrome address bar behavior in Firefox? I.e. I want Firefox to follow plain http links same as before, but if I type in example.com it should expand to https://example.com
AFAIK, Firefox has worked exactly like this for a long time. There is probably some way to disable that behavior, and when you type a site, it offers an http suggestion for you to reach easily, but the default is https.
Firefox 86 falls back on HTTP transparently (e.g. try it with sane-project.org). I'd like to disable that, but without also adding a (stateful, fingerprintable) confirmation step to follow HTTP links.
