'Where To Next'. Is this a risky place to browse.

Mooly said:

If I click 'New Tab' in MS Edge I get presented with a long page of current news items etc. Occasionally I'll scroll down and have a look, sometimes clicking on anything interesting.

Twice in the last couple of days I've had odd things happen. One clickable item seemed to be opening and altering another tab that was also open. When I closed Edge I was left with blatant pop up (or pop under) advertising still showing. Another odd occurrence was Edge prompting me that 'the Java file' had downloaded and was offering to open my downloads folder. Sure enough there was a Java file there. I hadn't clicked on anything other than the news items I was interested in.

Not happy with any of this I quickly restored back to a current disk image.

The question though is whether the stuff on that page is likely to be a problem, somewhere malware can hide ?

I use this a lot and have never come across the problem you are describing.
Have you installed java at all on your system.
I don't like java and since windows 8.1 and 10 have never used it.

You can choose any page as your home page. I like reading my morning paper when I first log on.
Google News

If you have a Google account, you can customize it to suit your preferences.

If you click the home button top left hand corner Bing will open and down along the bottom you have all the latest news etc.
If you see anything you like you can click on it and you are taken to a page where a link is to open it up and read the item in full
I use Bing as my main search engine and find it very fast and good

IMO, that page is fine, its just Microsoft's MSN page

Initial I enjoyed reading it, but now there are too many ads for store apps and auto playing videos so i got rid of it, just use another source for daily news now