That’s how SSL/TLS does the authorization step, but the typical encryption of the actual content sent back and forth uses a symmetric-key block cipher (the two sides negotiate and it’s pretty modular, so I think you can do whatever kind of encryption you want on the messages, even just sending plain text after a TLS handshake if you want).
True, but my point was that the actual key exchange (that is, the exchange of the symmetric keys used for the bulk of the encryption) is done using asymmetric-key encryption. Since this was in response to the question of how keys are exchanged, I thought it was the relevant phase to discuss.
Except, not necessarily, no. Sorry, my grandparent post should have been clearer that using a public-key method is only one of the ways to do authentication in SSL/TLS. Either way, some symmetric cipher is used for all the content.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cipher_suite