Facebook shall transfer its billion users to a safer connection. The bad news is: it is about to slow down. But that is good, perhaps.
Facebook by default is moving to the HTTPS connection to offer more security. That may result to slowing down for some users but the good news is, it shall shoo online thieves away. Users who are not happy may opt to go out.
A recent blog post talks about Facebook currently moving its North America users to a more secure internet connection but these users shall experience a slow down in net browsing. The rest of the FB users shall follow. HTTPS (hyper text transfer protocol over secure socket layer) is more secured than HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol). The “s” obviously stands for secure. It is the kind of thing found in retail sites when a lock-in window appears on screen after entering payment details.
Alex Rice of Facebook said in writing last year that it is expected to expect security change as web applications progress. HTTPS was a technology applied to e-commerce and banking sites, and now becoming a standard for any application that saves user data. Thus, Facebook has HTTPS as an option.
Facebook users by default shall have that option, to get more security but potential slow browsing. Frederic Wolens, also from Facebook, said in a news site that it is not a simple task to transfer a billion users to HTTPS and maintain the expected speed and stability, but they sure are making day to day progress.
Other services are already using HTTPS by default; such as Gmail.