Introduction
Users engaged in focused browsing tasks — research, study,
professional work — are frequently interrupted by ambient
content (advertisements, push notifications, extension alerts,
feed items) that is topically related to their interests but
temporally misaligned with their current task and moment of intent.
No existing open standard captures a user's active session
context at the granularity required to evaluate whether ambient
content is appropriate to surface now. Browser-level throttling
operates on volume, not semantic relevance. The Web Push API
standardizes delivery but not timing. Contextual ad networks
operate at the page level, not the session level, and are
proprietary and fragmented.
The cost is triple: interrupted cognitive flow for the user,
wasted impressions for advertisers, and unnecessary bandwidth
and compute consumed by the infrastructure.
We propose Contextual Navigation Signal (CNS), a browser-level,
privacy-preserving architecture that constructs a local model
of the user's active navigation context and uses it to gate
ambient content delivery — without exposing user data to any
external party.
Read the complete Explainer.
Feedback (Choose One)
Please provide all feedback below.
I welcome feedback in this thread, but encourage you to file
bugs against the Explainer.
Introduction
Users engaged in focused browsing tasks — research, study,
professional work — are frequently interrupted by ambient
content (advertisements, push notifications, extension alerts,
feed items) that is topically related to their interests but
temporally misaligned with their current task and moment of intent.
No existing open standard captures a user's active session
context at the granularity required to evaluate whether ambient
content is appropriate to surface now. Browser-level throttling
operates on volume, not semantic relevance. The Web Push API
standardizes delivery but not timing. Contextual ad networks
operate at the page level, not the session level, and are
proprietary and fragmented.
The cost is triple: interrupted cognitive flow for the user,
wasted impressions for advertisers, and unnecessary bandwidth
and compute consumed by the infrastructure.
We propose Contextual Navigation Signal (CNS), a browser-level,
privacy-preserving architecture that constructs a local model
of the user's active navigation context and uses it to gate
ambient content delivery — without exposing user data to any
external party.
Read the complete Explainer.
Feedback (Choose One)
Please provide all feedback below.
I welcome feedback in this thread, but encourage you to file
bugs against the Explainer.