After updating my iPad to iOS 13, I lost all of my tabs. I tried long pressing on the “+” in the upper right corner but only the last tab closed was there. Is there any way to get them back? I probably had 20 tabs opened.
iPad Air 3 Wi-Fi
Yep, this is one of the most annoying “features” (cough!) of iPadOS 13. Tabs continuously get lost, because Safari keeps moving tabs into their own separate windows. It’s absolutely ridiculous and annoying,
A quick fix for this is:
That’s exactly what happened to me! What is the point of this new feature? No warning, no instructions? So frustrating!
If you swipe up with four fingers or in some other way bring up the task switcher, you’ll see your other window(s) for Safari with tabs.
The “Reopen Closed Windows” button only appears if there are recently closed windows to re-open.
Closed windows “expire” after a period of time.
The Favourites Bar is enabled/disabled in Settings:
Settings > Safari > Show Favourites Bar - enable or disable as you prefer.
Workaround Idea
This is a well known complaint.it seems to me that Apple does not care to fix this.
Solution: Ditch Safari and use Chrome
I’m using the newest iOS 13.1.3 on iPad Pro and have been since it first came out. I lost all my tabs AND all the history not during the update, but from trying to move a tab over to the most right position in the tab bar. It opened up a new side by side view with that tab being in a new window instead (not what I was trying to do). When I swiped to end the side by side, I ended up with the one website window staying open and the window with all my tabs and all my years of research gone! And the history gone too. I also tried to close Safari and reopen hoping for my tabs back. Why would this simple thing delete all the history too? I really want and need my tabs and history back.
Ditto to both above. Tabs keep crashing after side view window pops up. No way to get them back. I’ve switched to Chrome. Hope everyone does to send a message to Apple. No idea why they’d make this terrible change to Safari, along with other mind boggling changes that don’t make any sense.
Yes, I've moved to the Brave browser, the one that I'm using on my Mac, for doing research on anything on my iPad. I do wish that iPadOS allowed replacing the default browser, though. I'd like to put Safari in my rear view mirror :-).
I have just had exactly the same problem as many of the other users in this thread, I accidentally opened a new window instead of a new tab, couldn’t figure out a way to remove the stupid thing as it is ****** near impossible to make the new window disappear - so like any rational person, I just swiped up to close the Safari App. BIG MISTAKE. Low and behold, THREE YEARS WORTH OF RESEARCH IS GONE - every SINGLE tab of a 300+ collection of critical web pages ARE NOW GONE.
Do you think you can offer a degree of sincerity or apology in your response? Because this is just completely typical of Apple - pointless updates, terrible user functionality and insincere, useless customer service.
I’ve lost three years of research, all of which were stored on my tabs, because some idiot at Apple didnt have the basic foresight to see a problem such as this arising - do you even have an apology to offer here?
[Edited by Moderator]
Lol. Three years of research? And your research was all done in open tabs? You never thought of bookmarking those websites? Or saving those links to Notes or a word processing document? Doesn’t seem like the research was very important if you just left them in open tabs, which have always been ephemeral.
Plus, as I posted earlier in 2 separate posts, your tabs are probably still there anyways, and there are at least 2 different ways to get to them.
This is the one and only remedy that works! Apple needs to clean up the issue because I keep losing all my open tabs constantly the past 3 months. I leave these tabs open for a reason, because I want to come back to them the next time I use my iPad for research purposes. Yeah, I understand you can view the prior history of open tabs in the history sectionbut that is a pain in the a** to have to do that every time you loose all your open tabs. This way you can actually get back your previous open tabs. I just wish there was a way to close all the other open windows after double clicking on the home button twice.
Old thread, but I totally feel you. I was skeptical about updating my iPad so I waited until 13.3 to do so. Everything was fine until I accidentally opened a tab into a new window. I was confused what to do, so I tapped, “merge all windows” not knowing what I was doing. Instead of deleting the new window, it deleted my other window and left me with nothing. For 3 years I had used up every single tab in my safari window as a time capsule of sorts. Many of the websites I kept don’t even exist anymore and now everything I had built up is gone and I have no backup to; guess I’ll have to start from scratch. Just wanted to let you know you’re not alone in this.
I just wanted to say that losing my tabs has and is incredibly irritating. When I phoned Apple a few times in October after it started, they blamed my iPad Pro and sadly announced it probably had a bug and needed to be returned to factory settings. I then found my iMac was out of date could not now back up my iPad. I resisted Apple’s advice as I was convinced it was to do with the update and not my device. Then I found found how to get my tabs back in Safari by myself. I have to do this several times a day and wish they the tabs didn’t keep disappearing.
I lost all safari tabs after updating to ios 13. How can i restore them?
