Chrome extension
The internet, turned down a little
Some days the headline gets you before you’ve decided to read it. The Meloa extension softens the heavy parts of a page, headlines, paragraphs and photos, so they’re still there, exactly as written, but they wait until you choose to look.
Free, no account needed. Extensions install on a computer, not a phone, so if you’re reading this on your phone, come back to this page later.
Nothing is hidden from you
This is what makes it different from a blocker. Nothing is removed, reordered or rewritten. A softened headline is the real headline, in place, one click from readable. The click is always yours. The point isn’t to keep you from the news. It’s to put a half-second between you and the page, so you meet it because you decided to.
Nothing gets sent anywhere to make that call, either. The extension reads the page in your own browser, checks it against a word list that ships inside the download, and softens what crosses the line. No page you visit is uploaded, no account is needed, and it spends no credits on any plan.
What it covers
Headlines
Titles and link text, the first thing that hits you on a front page you were only scrolling past.
Body text
Paragraphs, summaries and captions. The line under a mild headline is often the part that lands.
Images
Photos and video next to heavy text. A war photo doesn’t need a headline to do its work.
Each of the three is its own switch, with a sensitivity setting on top, so you can soften photos and leave the words alone if that suits you. It starts on eighteen big news sites, including the AP, Reuters, the BBC, the Guardian, CNN, Fox, the Times and the Post. Anywhere else is one button in the toolbar: Soften this site. It asks permission to read a site when you ask it to, not on install.
And then there is email
A dreaded email is a different problem from a dreaded headline, because you can’t scroll past it. In Gmail, the extension flags the ones that read tense before you open them, and softens the body of the one you do open. Same rule as everywhere else: one click from readable, and “I’ll read it myself” is always the other button.
The part that needs Meloa Premium
Next to that flag is an offer to go through it together. Take it and Talu opens the message with you: what it’s actually asking, separate from how it’s asking; which part is a real deadline and which part is tone; and a first line back, if the reply is what you’ve been carrying all week. It comes with Meloa Premium, and it’s why the extension exists.
Everything above this box works without it, on no plan, signed out.
It has no login of its own
The extension never asks for a password and never holds a session. If you’re signed in to Meloa in the same browser, it notices on your next visit to meloa.io and learns one thing: whether the walkthrough is available to you. That way the Gmail banner can name your plan before you click, not after. It can’t read your Meloa account, and uninstalling it takes nothing with it.
Get it
It installs from the Chrome Web Store, and the softening works the moment it lands. Nothing to set up, no account to make. The email walkthrough comes with a Meloa Premium account.
Meloa itself is the calendar underneath all of this.
Free to use, every day — no card, ever.
Make room for one thing