I built a "polite scraper" Chrome extension instead of a server-side scraper. Here's why.

Six weeks ago I started building SlotOwl — a Chrome extension that watches government appointment portals (visa, immigration, passport, Global Entry) and notifies you the moment a slot opens. This week I shipped it. This post is about ONE design decision I made early on that turned out to shape the whole product: I scrape inside the user's browser tab instead of on a server somewhere. If you're building anything that watches a third-party website on a user's behalf — appointment monitors, restoc