There is an age-old problem handicapping the iPad. The Safari browser can’t handle memory-swapping properly. When switching to another memory-intensive app and back, Safari needs to reload the current page.
Remember the word “multitasking”? It was used back in the day when marketing the new iPad. That word has been missing from iPad marketing in recent years.
Why? Well, there is a giant memory bug present in iOS since day one.
The system cannot handle more than 1 GB of memory at any one time when app switching, i.e “multitasking”.
Yes, you read that right.
Your shiny new iPad with a spanking 256GB of memory is no better than a 10-year old iPad when it comes to app switching when surfing the web.
And no, you can’t get around the problem using another browser. You see, Apple locks every browser vendor into their walled garden, and forces everyone to use their own flawed operating system routines for their web browser. You must use Apple’s Webkit software inside your iOS browser, even though Webkit cannot handle a memory-swap above 1GB.
The result if you open an app that needs to use more than one gigabyte of memory, the iPad drops the Safari web page from it’s RAM memory.
Most Youtube videos require that Safari takes control of more than one gigabyte of direct-access memory.
If you do a lot of web publishing this app switching problem is a real nuisance.
Let’s say you have 5 or 6 tabs open in Safari, you download a picture. You switch to an image editing app and edit that picture. You switch back to Safari to upload the edited picture.
This is where your problem starts. Your page has disapperaed.
Safari just sits there and does nothing until you click reload.
If you google the problem, you will find years’ worth of questions about this problem on support forums. But no fix from Apple. No comments from Apple.
Why? Because they can’t fix it. Obviously. If they could, they would.
If Apple haven’t been able to fix this big, glaring, obvious, mega failure of a bug in their 10+ year old operating system they never will. The iOS system apparently cannot handle above more than one GB of memory at any time when app switching however many times people make complaints about this problem.
The iPad is in most other respects a very capable machine on which it’s easy to edit and render large video files and do other memory-intensive tasks as long as you stay within one app.
Luckily for Apple users in the EU; we will be able to start app switching while surfing the web properly on an iPad for the first time ever maybe sometime this year when Apple releases a new version of its operating system. Version 17.4 will allow browsers using other software kits than Apple’s own webkit.