Thanks Raeken,
Did that and have mixed results
With Firefox it made no difference, still sticks on "New Tab" and proceeds no further
With Edge, the address bar now shows that it is trying to connect to Google, then after a few minutes, a message appears, "Hmmmm.....can't reach this page" with an error message "Error Code: Inet_ Connection_Timeout, but there is also a "Refresh the Page" link.
When clicked on, the Edge browser and Google open and is fully functional