Its always a priority for everyone to keep their passwords and other documents protected. Unfortunately these things become vulnerable when we are on a shared or insecure network. Recently Google has been advised by experts that some of its applications including gmail might be putting a huge number of users at risk of fraud by hackers. To remove this vulnerability Google is preparing to enable HTTPS (hyper text transfer protocol secure) by default instead HTTP.
Google has introduced the service of enabling HTTPS quite recently and now it might be enabled by default. Users right now can enable this by signing in to their gmail account ant then settings>general and then adjusting the browser connection property as per their requirement 
You can visit for these settings here.
Using HTTPS might slow down the connectivity and in my opinion it would not be a good option then. Gmail already loads bit slowly and i always see this loading sign whenever i sign in to gmail even though i have a 1Mb connection….
Anyways google is doing research on this and experimentation has started to give the users the best possible, according to a google software engineer.
You may see the official statements about this here.
