You're missing the point - Google knows how many +1s the page received. But the user's browser doesn't, so it can't display the +1 count without contacting the

You're missing the point - Google knows how many +1s the page received. But the user's browser doesn't, so it can't display the +1 count without contacting the server (and sending the page URL) to find out. I have to wonder if this is an unintended side effect of the recent push to have site move to HTTPS - it used to be that HTTPS requests were mostly unique to a user, but now lots of "regular" pages are being requested using HTTP and if you want to make any kind of extension that return data about pages (+1, anti-phishing, etc) you're probably going to to want to send HTTPS URLS as well.