hello, i'm no expert regarding the issue, but it may well be, that the spdy-protocol, that is used by google on its secure sites (and twitter atm), is causing the behaviour that you've observed. ''"SPDY connections are persistent connections. For best performance, it is expected that clients will not close open connections until the user navigates away from all web pages referencing a connection, or until the server closes the connection. Servers are encouraged to leave connections open for as long as possible, but can terminate idle connections if necessary."'' http://mbelshe.github.com/SPDY-Specification/draft-mbelshe-spdy-00.xml#rfc.section.2.1 you may want to try to disable the support for the spdy protocol in firefox (in about:config) and see if this changes the number and length of connections to the server.

You have found the solution, the culprit is SPDY protocol. Thanks! :)