on the stock Android browsers, Chrome on the desktop, and others, all sites are redirected to 'https' even if i manually type in 'http'.
Only if your phone is broken is some very strange way. But get into the habit of NOT typing the http:// part of the address (in any web browser on any computer). It's assumed. (It's not part of the address, it's telling the browser to use http protocol on port 80 - which is the default. If you want to save time, include the / at the end of an address that ends in a directory [and you have to learn to recognize that]. Not including the slash means that the browser gets told by the site that the address is a directory, and it has to make another request with the slash added. We're still only talking about a second or, if conditions are really bad, maybe as much as 3 seconds.)
as a result, given that i'm only able to get online via 4G/3G, this can cause extremely long load times, often a long delay when i type in an address before it actually loads
If the redirect is happening in the phone, it takes about a microsecond or less.
mobile versions of sites often default to http, vs. https
That would be up to the way the site developer wrote the site. It has nothing to do with the phone. A secure page is https. If it's http it's not secure. It has nothing to do with whether it's a mobile browser (which is what causes the site to send back the mobile version) or not.
If you're ever asked for information you'd prefer to be secure, and the address is
http://, DON'T enter the information. Mobile browser or not, you're not on a secure page, so people who can get to the packets between you and the site (that's how data is stolen, and the reason for secure sites) can get your "secure" data.
is there some way to force Google Chrome or the AOSP/Samsung stock web browser to always browse in http, and not in https?
"Forcing a browser to browse in http, not https" doesn't even mean anything, it's just words that happen to parse in English.
The browser uses the port it's told to use, 80 (if the address is http) or 443 (if the address is https). If it's https, there's a different protocol used than if it's http (and that protocol is more or less more secure than an unsecured page), but that's like saying that French uses different words than English - it doesn't take longer to speak French.
Or are you confusing the m. at the beginning of the address with http and secure http (https)? Type aol.com in the address bar in Chrome on your phone and the address you'll be at is m.aol.com, unless you've set Chrome to desktop mode, in which case it's claiming to be, IIRC, Safari 5.5, so there's no redirect to the mobile site. That redirection (and if it takes more than a fraction of a second it's the fault of someone who thinks he knows how to develop websites but is 5 clues short of clueless) can be eliminated by putting an m. at the beginning of the address (if you know that the site has a mobile version - because if it doesn't, you'll get a 404 or similar error).
Remember also, when using 3G/4G, you're going through a proxy of sorts (your carrier's gateway) which, itself, can do some redirection - and it's not something you can do anything about. This isn't a "this is the cause" situation, it's a situation in which you can be getting a delay long enough to cause the timeouts you're getting at any of about half a dozen points, for a few different reasons at each point, some of which are beyond your ability to even diagnose (like redirection at the gateway - you can't detect that, and you have no control over it).
But the browser doesn't "browse in http" or "browse in https", it browses. By default it uses the port and protocol it's told to (which is http on port 80 if it's not told anything), but you can change the port in the address. (Changing the protocol without changing the address means changing the part to the left of :// and adding the port you want used. IOW, if you still want port 80 to be used, but you want FTP protocol used, it's
ftp://address.here.com:80, because ftp:// means "use FTP protocol and use port 21".)
None of which has anything to do with your timeouts. You'll have to look elsewhere for the problem. (And until you know what the problem actually is, you can't fix it.)
