The answers you have already to this are good enough to give you an idea of what's going on. If you want to dig further and actually have a look at what's going

The answers you have already to this are good enough to give you an idea of what's going on. If you want to dig further and actually have a look at what's going on when an http vs. https session is established, grab a tool like Fiddler or Wireshark (or Charles(?) on the Mac) to actually have a look at the traffic as it's transmitted and received. I'd suggest starting off easy with Fiddler or Charles as you won't have to trawl through a bunch of raw TCP traffic to figure it out, they're nicely filtered to HTTP/S traffic. Once you've figured out Fiddler, then dig further with Wireshark. Both tools are invaluable for debugging web traffic. There's a couple of tutorials that allow you to act as a man-in-the-middle on your own connection to sniff the SSL traffic and figure out what's going on: http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/Fire.. http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/Fire.... These tools are really useful in helping you understand further exactly what's going on.