I have read a article related with your question. following is the link.
https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140717115238-176301000-accessing-hdfs-using-the-webhdfs-rest-api-vs-httpfs
WebHDFS vs HttpFs
Major difference between WebHDFS and HttpFs: WebHDFS needs access to all nodes of the cluster and when some data is read it is transmitted from that node directly, whereas in HttpFs, a singe node will act similar to a "gateway" and will be a single point of data transfer to the client node. So, HttpFs could be choked during a large file transfer but the good thing is that we are minimizing the footprint required to access HDFS.