Let me just say that I have had an iPad 2 ever since it came out (literally, snagged mine the second day after release), and it NEVER had this level of problem with Safari crashing until iOS 7 came out. Yes, there was the occasional Safari or other crash. Yes, some earlier versions of iOS seemed particularly unstable--when iOS 6 first came out, I remember noticing frequent Safari crashes, which I thought were especially bad at the time and caused me much annoyance. But (1) it was never anywhere near as bad as with iOS 7 from day one, and (2) it was fixed with updates within a few weeks. By the last version of iOS 6, I was getting the most stable Safari performance I ever remember having on my iPad (which I use heavily for web browsing).
The instability of Safari in iOS 7 is by far the worst it has ever been. And the fact that we are now three months from iOS 7's release and the problem is still not fixed (let alone the fact that they did not catch and correct this during beta testing in the first place--I mean, seriously?) have me pretty infuriated.
After years of owning iOS devices (4 versions of iPhone, and now 2 of iPad) and occasionally lurking this forum when a problem cropped up, this was the first problem that was so bad and went uncorrected so long that I was prompted to register and start posting about it. Indeed, I think I might have created the very first threads here about this specific problem (i.e., the thread topic was specifically about iOS 7 Safari crashes) on 9/27, since I searched and didn't find any discussions specifically about iOS 7 Safari.
Anyway, at this point, I have spent three months with Safari crashing on me multiple times per day on iPad 2, iPhone 5, and now brand, shiny, expensive, new iPad Air. I repeat, I NEVER had this same level of problem BEFORE iOS 7--if that were the case, I'm sure I would have stopped buying Apple products a long time ago.