407823 - https (secure) pages usually take much longer to load

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Izzy]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11 Creative ZENcast v1.02.08
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.11) Gecko/20071127 Firefox/2.0.0.11 Creative ZENcast v1.02.08

90 percent of the time pages that start with https take much longer to load than regular pages. This disrupts browsing.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Browse through a https site
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

Isn't that normal ? The SSL and TLS protocols consume a lot of cpu, due to the encryption algorithms. They will never be as fast as regular http pages.

And on top of that, https pages are NOT cached by default. See bug 309368.

Comment 2

[Jesse Ruderman]

Is https://www.squarefree.com/ much slower for you than http://www.squarefree.com/ ?  If not, can you give an example of a site that's served over both http and https and is much slower for you when loaded using https?

How much slower is https for you?  It should be slightly slower, but not much slower -- definitely not enough to disrupt browsing.  Bugzilla would drive me crazy otherwise ;)

Comment 3

[Izzy]

(In reply to comment #2)
> Is https://www.squarefree.com/ much slower for you than
> http://www.squarefree.com/ ?  If not, can you give an example of a site that's
> served over both http and https and is much slower for you when loaded using
> https?
> 
> How much slower is https for you?  It should be slightly slower, but not much
> slower -- definitely not enough to disrupt browsing.  Bugzilla would drive me
> crazy otherwise ;)
> 
Gmail is much slower as https, and sites where I do banking

Comment 4

[Jesse Ruderman]

If Gmail is slower over https than http, you should probably contact Google.  And bank sites just tend to be slow (for many meanings of the word "slow").

Comment 5

[Gary Campbell]

It is the same for me. I have gotten around it by double clicking the security (lock) icon in the bottom corner when viewing https pages. This is very annoying though, having to do this all of the time...

Comment 6

[Jo Hermans]

(In reply to comment #5)
> It is the same for me. I have gotten around it by double clicking the security
> (lock) icon in the bottom corner when viewing https pages. This is very
> annoying though, having to do this all of the time...

I'm confused. How does clicking the lock icon help you load https faster ?

Comment 7

[Gary Campbell]

(In reply to comment #6)
> (In reply to comment #5)
> > It is the same for me. I have gotten around it by double clicking the security
> > (lock) icon in the bottom corner when viewing https pages. This is very
> > annoying though, having to do this all of the time...
> 
> I'm confused. How does clicking the lock icon help you load https faster ?

It just does... Im not too sure why. I can wait for 5 minutes for my bank page to come up, then as soon as I double click the lock icon, it comes within 10 seconds. I discovered this while in an annoyed state I started clicking everything because it was taking so long to load my banking site. I found out that this works on all HTTPS sites.

Comment 8

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

izzy, do you still see this?

(In reply to comment #2)
> Is https://www.squarefree.com/ much slower for you than
> http://www.squarefree.com/ ?  If not, can you give an example of a site that's
> served over both http and https and is much slower for you when loaded using
> https?

same response for me
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3) Gecko/20090305 Firefox/3.1b3

Comment 9

[Tyler Downer [He/Him]]

This bug was originally reported on Firefox 2.x or older, which is no longer supported and will not be receiving any more updates. I strongly suggest that you update to Firefox 3.6.6 or later, update your plugins (flash, adobe, etc.), and retest in a new profile. If you still see the issue with the updated Firefox, please post here. Otherwise, please close as RESOLVED > WORKSFORME
http://www.mozilla.com
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Managing+profiles
http://support.mozilla.com/kb/Safe+mode

Comment 10

[Izzy]

Thank you