Facebook To Slowdown A Bit While Transitioning To Secure Connection

Facebook users are likely to witness a slight slowdown in their connections shortly as the social networking site makes the transition for all its users to secure HTTPS connection this week.

Apparently, Facebook has spent two years making infrastructure improvements to facilitate the transition to HTTPS, and it provides an opt-out facility of HTTPS through its account security settings to ensure maximum speed.

Though Facebook enabled HTTPS in January 2011, with opt-in facility for users to enable secure browsing in HTTPS, it came with the warning: "Encrypted pages take longer to load, so you may notice that Facebook is slower using HTTPS.”

A Facebook Developer Blog post announced a few days ago: “This week, we’re starting to roll out HTTPS for all North America users and will be soon rolling out to the rest of the world.”

Speaking to TechCrunch, Facebook security policy manager Frederic Wolens said: "It is far from a simple task to build out this capability for the more than a billion people that use the site and retain the stability and speed we expect, but we are making progress daily towards this end. This may slow down connections only slightly, but we have deployed significant performance enhancements to our load balancing infrastructure to mitigate most of the impact of moving to HTTPS, and will be continuing this work as we deploy this feature.”

Several people access Facebook from public Wi-Fi and computers. So HTTPS connection ensures they are not getting snooped on. Search giant, Google moved Gmail to HTTPS in January 2010.