A new flag spotted in Chromium’s source code suggests Google is testing a built-in way for Chrome to notify users when an out-of-stock product becomes available again. The change, titled “Add a feature flag for In Stock Notification,” was submitted by Chromium engineer Luis Antunes and merged into the main branch on May 13. It introduces a flag internally named kInStockNotification in Chrome’s commerce component.
According to the Chromium code review, the flag “will be used to enable/disable in-stock notification detection and subscription.” The user-facing description, visible to anyone who enables it via chrome://flags, is more specific: it “enables detecting, showing, and subscribing to back-in-stock notifications on eligible product pages.” In the flags menu, it would appear under the name “Enable the In Stock Notification Manager,” listed with the internal id in-stock-notification.
The flag is gated to desktop platforms only, meaning it would apply to Chrome on Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, and Linux rather than Android or iOS. It lives alongside Chrome’s existing commerce features, the same area of the codebase that already powers price tracking and other shopping-related tools in the browser. The flag ships disabled by default, which is standard practice for early-stage Chromium work — it gives engineers a way to build and test a feature internally before deciding whether, or how, to expose it more broadly.
If it does reach Chrome, an in-stock notification manager would extend the browser’s existing shopping toolkit in a logical direction: instead of manually checking back on a sold-out item, Chrome could detect a “back in stock” signal on a supported product page and let users subscribe to get notified automatically. That would put Chrome in more direct competition with the in-stock alert features already offered by some retailers and third-party browser extensions.
As with any flag spotted in Chromium’s source code, this is an early, experimental signal rather than a confirmed feature. Google frequently tests changes this way and ships them later, modifies them substantially, or abandons them entirely before they ever reach a stable Chrome release. There’s no public timeline yet for when, or whether, this flag will surface in Chrome’s flags menu for regular users to try.
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