Notifications grouped or throttled to prevent spamming the user

Unthrottled chrome.notifications.create calls on every webRequest event, price-check tick, or polling cycle flood the OS notification center with dozens of popups per minute. Users disable notifications at the OS level, uninstall the extension, or leave one-star reviews citing spam. On macOS and Windows, excessive notifications also trigger system-level rate limiting that silently drops later — potentially important — alerts. Chrome Web Store reviewers flag notification-spamming extensions during policy review and may reject updates.

Gate every chrome.notifications.create call behind a timestamp check so notifications fire at most once per cooldown window, and batch high-frequency events into a summary. Put the throttle in the background service worker at background.js:

let last = 0;
const COOLDOWN = 30_000;
function maybeNotify(title, message) {
  if (Date.now() - last < COOLDOWN) return;
  last = Date.now();
  chrome.notifications.create({ type: 'basic', iconUrl: 'icons/48.png', title, message });
}