Microsoft Edge includes a feature called Visual Search, which automatically overlays a small, floating “magnifying glass” icon over images when you hover your mouse cursor over them. Clicking this icon performs a reverse image search via Bing, attempting to find similar images or related products across the web. While Microsoft positions this as a convenient shopping and research tool, many users find the persistent pop-up icon highly intrusive. It often obscures critical parts of images, triggers accidentally during routine web browsing, and adds unnecessary visual clutter to modern, image-heavy websites.
This guide explains how to completely disable the Visual Search hover icon in Microsoft Edge, ensuring that images remain clean and unobstructed when you move your mouse over them.
Disable Visual Search via Settings
Microsoft allows you to disable this overlay globally, preventing it from appearing on any website you visit.
- Launch the Microsoft Edge browser.
- Click on the Settings and more button (the three horizontal dots) located in the top-right corner of the window.
- From the drop-down menu, select Settings (the gear icon near the bottom).
- In the left-hand navigation sidebar of the Settings menu, click on Appearance.
- Scroll down through the Appearance options until you reach the Context menus section.
- Locate the setting labelled Hover menu (or “Visual search on hover” depending on your exact version of Edge) and click on it.
- Toggle the switch next to Show hover menu on image hover to the Off position.
The Browsing Impact
The moment you disable this setting, the change takes effect immediately across all open tabs.
You can verify the change by navigating to any website with large photographs (such as a news site or a social media feed) and hovering your cursor over an image. The floating magnifying glass will no longer appear. If you still occasionally need to perform a reverse image search, you haven’t lost the functionality entirely; you can still right-click on any image and select Search web for image from the standard context menu, keeping your browsing experience both clean and functional.