How is this a gmail specific problem? (Score 1)

Session hijacking is not a new vulnerability and it is surely not a problem that only the gmail users face. All websites that use sessions to identify users between requests are vulnerable to this. The news here is that now script kiddies have access to a tool to do this. Secondly, the website claims that gmail uses this functionality for low bandwidth users. That may be true. But more than that, SSL handshake is a lot more computationally expensive for the server than it is for the client because server has to perform the asymmetric decryption (of the random number generated by the client encrypted by server's public key). A HTTPS server is supposedly 9 times slower than a HTTP server. So, there is another reason why servers avoid SSL by default.