Nono
About

Some numbers don't deserve your attention.

A calorie count next to a meal. A follower tally under a post. The total at checkout. The number on a scale. Plenty of numbers on the web aren't information you asked for (they're just there), quietly pulling focus and setting off a small calculation in your head before you've decided whether you even care.

Nono is a browser extension that takes those numbers out of the picture. Not by blocking pages or stripping content, but by softly blurring the specific numbers you tell it to. The rest of the page stays exactly as it is. When you genuinely want a value, you hover and it sharpens back into view.

Why it exists

For plenty of people, numbers like calorie counts aren't neutral information, they're a trigger that turns an ordinary moment into a hard one. The web doesn't know this, so it keeps serving them up: under a recipe, beside a menu item, next to a post's follower count, embedded in a food photo on someone's blog.

The need isn't small. Roughly 9% of people in the United States, nearly 31 million, will experience an eating disorder in their lifetime.[1] Globally, prevalence nearly doubled between 2000 and 2018, rising from about 3.5% to 7.8%.[2] Around 22% of children and adolescents worldwide show signs of disordered eating,[3] and adolescents who restricted their eating were found to be far more likely to develop an eating disorder than those who didn't.[4]

Calorie counts in particular aren't a neutral public-health intervention. A 2025 systematic review and meta-synthesis found that for people with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, visible calorie counts trigger restriction; for people with binge eating disorder, they increase calorie selection through emotional reactance and distress. Participants reported that labels reinforced disorder-specific thinking, drove food choices away from internal cues, and increased isolation. As people began avoiding restaurants and social eating to stay out of range of the numbers.[5]

Nono can't fix the underlying policy, calorie labeling is now baked into restaurants, apps, and packaging worldwide. What it can do is let you decide, on your own terms, when a number gets to be visible and when it doesn't.

Nono reduces unwanted exposure. It isn't treatment, and it isn't a substitute for professional care. If you're struggling, please reach out to a qualified professional or an eating disorder support line in your area.

What it actually does

Nono scans the text on a page for things that match your rules, a few sensible defaults like calories and prices, plus any custom pattern you write as a regular expression. Anything that matches gets a blur applied in your browser, as the page loads.

Everything happens locally, in your browser. Nono doesn't need an account, and it doesn't send the pages you visit anywhere. The privacy page spells out exactly what is and isn't collected.

Who makes it

Nono is built and maintained by one developer as an independent project. That means it moves at a human pace, and it means your bug reports and feature ideas land directly with the person who can act on them. If something's broken or missing, the support page is the place to say so.

Where it's headed

The near-term focus is the same on Chrome and Safari: fast, reliable matching, better defaults, and giving you finer control over your own rules without making the settings a chore. Nothing fancier than that.

A long-term goal is to make this available device wide. Like checking the entire screen for numbers to blur, not just the browser window. However, this would require significant development effort and platform support.

Another idea would be to have this extension draw attention to the problem of unwanted numbers, and have this become an accessability option on apps and websites.

References

  1. Deloitte Access Economics. (2020). The Social and Economic Cost of Eating Disorders in the United States of America. Prepared for the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders (STRIPED). See also: National Eating Disorders Association — statistics.
  2. Galmiche, M., Déchelotte, P., Lambert, G., & Tavolacci, M. P. (2019). Prevalence of eating disorders over the 2000-2018 period: a systematic literature review. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 109(5), 1402-1413.
  3. López-Gil, J. F., Garcia-Hermoso, A., Smith, L., et al. (2023). Global proportion of disordered eating in children and adolescents. JAMA Pediatrics, 177(4), 363-372.
  4. Patton, G. C., Selzer, R., Coffey, C., Carlin, J. B., & Wolfe, R. (1999). Onset of adolescent eating disorders: population based cohort study over 3 years. BMJ, 318(7186), 765-768.
  5. Trompeter, N., et al. (2025). Calorie labeling and eating disorders: a systematic review and meta-synthesis. BMJ Public Health, 3, e000862. Summarized in: Calorie Labels on Restaurant Menus. Eating Disorders Review, 36(5).