I don't disagree that there is a time and a place for using HTTPS, what I do have an issue with is that HTTPS handshaking takes 4 to 10 times longer to transfer than normal HTTP. Therefore if you are unfortunate enough to be stuck on a slow and high latency 20CN ADSL connection (like me), then navigating an entirely HTTPS website is like browsing in treacle.
It is possible to make entirely HTTPS website performance faster, by doing clever ticks keeping sessions open, etc, but those tricks work better with more static websites, and are much more difficult to achieve on webpages which contain high percentages of dynamic content. Where it becomes an issue, is where there are a succession of HTTPS fetches, each taking a long time to transfer (because of multiple HTTPS handshakes * latency) so the overall effect is that the page takes a long time to build.
If it "is in the users interest that this data be transferred in an encrypted manner (HTTPS)", then what is there on this public forum (other than logging in, and possibly the user settings) which need to be hidden (during browsing) which doesn't appear in the public domain that any old Tom, Dick, Harry, or NSA can see by simply using their web browser ?. If you look at eBay for example, that is a much more complex website than this, they only use HTTPS for pages which need to be secure, but for most of the time such as looking for items or viewing your private watch list, those pages are HTTP and page loading or refreshing is very fast. Our previous forum was HTTP with a secure login, that was also fast, and there were no issues with user privacy back then.
If all entirely HTTPS websites had such dire page loading times as this, then I would accept that nothing could be done. But the fact is that I visit such pages all the time, and while they are slightly slower to load, they are not so slow as to cause the slightest frustration, after all that is the nature of using the internet - some sites are blazing fast and others take a little while to load. With this forum though, there are frequent times when I have to remember to count to twenty before pressing the next button, because the page load hasn't completed in the background, and the page suddenly reformats and the buttons move or the cursor is no longer in the box where I had started typing. It is ONLY this website which causes me these issues, so what can Plusnet do to make this forum usable to all their customers ?.
