This is a long standing behavior. Think the techs would prefer a revert to the http://www.... addresses, but as with me, once I'm logged in, the browser [Firefox in my case from 3 to now 15.0.1] sticks to the https://secure... addresses which is slower / puts more load on web server.

Whilst writing this, I noted that a long standing signout/page navigation/refresh delay issue of 10-20 seconds on FF up to including 13.0.xx has now under 15.0.1 magically disappeared. All pages load more or less immediate and releasing the frozen state. The most prominent delay I experienced was signing out, which jumps back to the front page, which then froze the browser for up to 30 seconds... notihng working, not tab changing either. No idea what changed this, but for longer had my browser configured to report back performance statistics back to mortadella mozilla, so maybe they optimized their code from WCG web stats. It's now infinitely better browsing the forums in either signed in or out state.