[afdssfda]

HTTPS = more overhead than HTTP, so this is going to increase network traffic everywhere that uses Google that has people logged in for Gmail, which is just about everywhere to some extent. It will be minor, but could still have a detrimental effect.

[ceejayoz]

Unencrypted HTTP has its own detrimental effects.

[metageek]

>HTTPS = more overhead than HTTP

Is that true? Most encryption schemes include compression (since compression removes redundancy, and redundancy is where cryptanalysts attack).

[tonfa]

And I guess if you use chrome(ium), you're already using an encrypted channel with SPDY anyway.

[afdssfda]

SSL handshaking causes more traffic. It may be compressed, but small pages like the Google main search page (the heaviest hit) may show an increase in traffic, even after compression is factored in. Here's one place where HTTP vs HTTPS is discussed, and a few quotes:

"Servers that are heavy on serving a fairly small set of static pages that can easily be cached in memory suffer from a much higher overhead... SSL handshaking is the major cost of HTTPS."

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/149274/http-vs-https-perf...