Q: iPad Safari crashing regularly

I'm in the process of developing a web app for the iPad that is basically a web gallery. I've just found out from some pretty extensive testing a threshold of about 4 to 5mb worth of images progressively being loaded to a web page is causing safari to crash every time on my iPad. The page is a total of 32, 72dpi images that are 992x600.

Funny thing is this runs perfect on my 4G iPhone running iOS4.

Any web app developers out there with work arounds with loading and unloading images?

It's not just Safari. I spend a lot of time on photography forums and there are certain pages with lots of images that will cause the browser to close at the same spot, every time. And this happens exactly the same way with 3 different browsers. So apparently there is a limit to how much a browser is allowed to cache and then it is just forced to quit. Not a very elegant way to handle things, but hopefully Apple will be aware of this and come up with something better.

Same problem here. No pattern but I will be browsing a web page and Safari just closes. No warning at all.

I have a 64GB iPad with 3g and it either crashes at a certain spot or does not display all of the pictures on the webpage. I have tried to just scroll rapidly to the bottom of the page and work my way back up and that enables me to read the article but all of the pictures near the bottom of the page are blue squares with a "?" inside them since it cannot render the image. I believe that it is a video memory issue and hopefully Apple will come out with a patch to alleviate this very bad annoyance. It is really making me not like my iPad.

Interesting discussion. While mine doesn't crash, I do see the same behavior that images are simply missing. I noticed the same with emails that contain a lot of images. If there are too many some images will just not show up.

Since it seems to be the same with different browsers and even email it appears to be a memory limit on the iPad. Apple might have set this limit just a little too conservative.

Does that happen on just 3G or WiFi too?

It is a memory limit issue. There are simply some sites that ridiculously load many hundreds of images that are not simply thumbs linking to full size images but the actual full size images being shown as thumbs. Even with a regular computer such sites are quite a strain and are lousy to be viewing images from.

A photo site like pbase does it right and I can load a few tabs with hundreds of thumbs that link just fine to larger images.

Another thing that will help tremendously is to control the number of tabs (I use the iCab browser which uses tabs and which I highly recommend) or open browser windows with Safari. Don't let them go beyond say five or so and even less for pages with hundreds of thumbs. With iCab it is very easy to keep track of your tabs to limit memory usage.

Also, with iCab you can set links to open as separate tabs instead of using the back key. By doing so you prevent the home page from constantly reloading. This speeds up your surfing dramatically because now your surfing experience is more like using a normal computer.

Hopefully the next version of the iPad gets the amount of memory it should have gotten in the first place. It makes no sense that the iPhone has twice the amount of memory as the iPad.

i was wrong about this. The regular Facebook webpage on safarin works fine on my ipad. I made an assumption from using the fb app on my ipod touch.

This actually seems to be a pretty heavy issue, see: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2986039/ipad-iphone-browser-crashing-when-loa ding-images-in-javascript

As it is right now, it's impossible to create a WebApp that loads a lot of images. Say for example I wanted to create a slide-show that just loads a never ending stream of images, one after another, with a new one every 10 seconds. This should easily be possible, but it looks like MobileSafari doesn't free up the space once an image has been "unloaded", it just keeps it in the memory.

Havent noticed this before until yesterday when I used maps.google.com .. after that I noticed it on several other fairly common sites..

Same thing is happening on mine. Very frustrating and expensive because each time I restart Safari all the photos need to load again and my data is through cellular.

So we can definitely say that this is a bug. How would one report such a bug to Apple? Perhaps they will be able to fix this in a future update?

Ironically this is happening to me on one of Apple's own iPad pages...

Whenever I they to watch the Racer HD video on http://www.apple.com/ipad/apps-for-ipad/ it tries to load the video and then crashes after a couple of seconds. It's done this four times in a row just now.

This page seems to fit the criteria others have mentioned of being reasonably image and video heavy, but you'd think they'd at least make their own page viewable on the device it's supposed to be promoting!!

Same to me.
Safari automatically close very frequently even using apple web site.

In what may be a related issue, I've noticed that on an iPad, Google Street View will frequently crash when being used in conjunction with a V3 Google Map. This doesn't happen with any other version of Safari, including iPhone version.