Wow. Talk about inefficiency. It just said the same thing I did, but using twenty times as many characters.

>Yes and no: There's still a rather large latency improvement even when you're using plain HTTP (not that you should go without encryption).

Of course. An unencrypted HTTP request takes a single roundtrip to complete. The client sends the request and receives the response. The only additional cost is to set up the connection, which is also saved when the connection is kept open with a websocket.