Edge seems to have recently come out with a Visual Search feature, which pops up an icon above all images, allowing you to search for them etc. Very nice. See screenshot:

However, is it possible to switch this off via javascript or something similar? I am running a website where users are meant to click images as part of a personality profile mechanism, which is very sensitive to the selection environment. This distraction is very much unwanted.

Thanks in advance.

p.s. do any other browsers have any features like this I should watch out for?

Edge seems to have recently come out with a Visual Search feature, which pops up an icon above all images, allowing you to search for them etc. Very nice. See screenshot:

However, is it possible to switch this off via javascript or something similar? I am running a website where users are meant to click images as part of a personality profile mechanism, which is very sensitive to the selection environment. This distraction is very much unwanted.

Thanks in advance.

p.s. do any other browsers have any features like this I should watch out for?

• javascript
• html
• vb.net
• model-view-controller

• 1 Oh great! When you hover over an image of a razor blade on my website it suggests 'Geniune Toyota Tacoma Door Sill Protectors'. Now the image search is nice - and it does look like a door sill protector the way its cropped - but it's completely out of place :-/ – Simon_Weaver Commented Jun 17, 2022 at 5:04
• @Simon_Weaver yes, a very unfortunate, unwanted feature that indeed can ruin the tone of a site, and as you have shown, can even come to mock it – Rabbi Kaii Commented Feb 18, 2023 at 19:58
• I disabled it so I'm not tracking how it works. Is it really still active by default :-( – Simon_Weaver Commented Feb 19, 2023 at 7:16

3 Answers 3

Please report your dislike of this feature to Microsoft!

Everybody who comes to this page PLEASE report this to Microsoft.

Click the 3 dots that appears on top of the image and choose 'Send Feedback'.

This is not OK without a CSS / meta tag workaround to disable it.

I'll happily delete this answer if a way to disable it in code is discovered - but in the meantime we need to nip it in the bud - so please report it. Sorry this isn't really an answer - but if you've found this question you're probably as annoyed as me right now!

Had some success in turning off pointer events on the img using css pointer-events: none and haven't found a better solution thus far.

For those who have problems because pointer-events: none (css) disables the click event. If you wrap your picture in an extra div-container and wrap this div-container into an a-tag, the picture will behave like a link. The structure will look like this:

<a href="/">
    <div>
        <img src="logo.png" />
    </div>
</a>

Not a beauty, but it works. Don't know if workarounds like this are possible for all pointer-events.