abayley

HTTPS is HTTP over TLS (formerly SSL). TLS is stateful, so it probably won't scale as well as regular HTTP. Also, I think it will render HTTP caches useless.

I believe SSL (TLS) is stateful, though, so HTTPS would be too. The browser would keep the TLS socket connection open for multiple HTTP requests, which would tie up resources on the server.

Something I'm not clear on: isn't HTTPS a stateful protocol (unlike HTTP)? If so, won't that have scalability implications? I assumed that was the reason most retail sites make you shop in HTTP, and then switch over to HTTPS for the payment step.