Pages as little icons in Safari, Mail iOS 15 for IPad

Any way I can turn off this “feature”?

Hate the shelves! Hate the shelves! Annoying, and I don’t need them.

if you swipe up very slowly you can delete them, at least on my iPad. They still linger on my calendar however. Maybe someone can help with that.

I think I found out! On iPad in safari, upper right hand corner of screen…..the 4 boxes icon…..press and hold that icon…..the menu appears, choose “Merge All Windows “……..now all the open windows should be in one row in the same window and you can close each with the X on the left side of each tab. And I think that annoying feature is turned off once you merge all windows the one time. Hope that helped.

Ahh - you have encountered “the shelf”… a new multi-tasking feature of iPadOS15. You currently have many open Safari Windows.

Tapping the Safari icon summons the shelf view - which will show you a thumbnail image of all the open Windows/instances of the Safari App along the bottom of the screen. Where multiple instances of an App are running, a simple tap of a chosen thumbnail will instantly switch to that window/view. Tapping anywhere else on the screen causes the animated collapse of the shelf view.

For example, if you have three running instances of Safari, tapping the Safari icon will open the shelf with four thumbnails - one thumbnail for each of the three running instances - plus another (with a “+’) with which you can open a New Window/instance of Safari. Simply tapping a thumbnail will switch directly to that running Window/instance. Swiping a thumbnail off the top of the screen will close the associated Safari Window/instance.

This article from Appleinsider has a useful explanation of this new feature along with many of the updates to multitasking:

https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/08/12/how-to-master-multitasking-on-ipad-and-ipad-pro-in-ipados-15

The iPad User Guide is also a rich source of frequently overlooked information. The Guide is available both online using a web browser (such as Safari), or as an Apple Books download:

iPad User Guide - Apple Support

https://books.apple.com/book/id1567104892

It is perhaps worth noting that the shelf is a fundamental element of the revised User Interface - and cannot be disabled.

Apple do invite constructive comments and feature requests via their Product Feedback pages:

Feedback - iPad - Apple

The animated collapse of the shelf might, very reasonably, be a feature in in need of modification - at least in context of reduced-motion controls.

The Merge All Windows simply merges all the currently open Safari tabs into a single instance of Safari - with all the tabs already open. The Shelf will still be present - as will the ability to open additional instances of Safari (either deliberately or accidentally).

As already stated, multitasking and the shelf feature cannot be be disabled in iPadOS15.x.

Brilliant thanks so much, those nasty little annoying start page icons have gone! Hurrah!

I have NO ‘open book page’’ icon at all on my iPad updated to IOS 15. Did I mistakenly toss it away when I dumped all those widgets when I first turned it on? Did I get a bad update? There are three dots at the end of the head line, which show me only one file of Favorites, not the sub files . Is there any way to get that icon back?

Regardless, that did away with the annoying screenshot windows open at the bottom of the page that jump away when you touch the screen each time I open safari. It also closed out those safari windows not being used or wanted and were hogging up memory for nothing.

I don’t know if this is a recent change or not, but if you take the widget (?) small screen at the bottom left of the Safari display (apples shelf) and swipe it up till it’s off the screen it will disappear. Continue with all the others and you will finally be rid of these annoying screens. I had to do this for 12 screens but still have no idea how they got there to begin with.

This one worked for me. Touch the little thumb nail page at the bottom of the screen and drag it UP off the top of the page. Had two left, which is ok. Thank you for figuring this out…I had been searching for days trying to get rid of these, and just kept adding more! I get so tired of all these updates and features that are not helpful to me! It’s like someone has to justify their reason to be on the payroll, so they more and redesign things.

Press the 4 box icon top right and go to ‘merge all windows’. The tabs should appear under the address bar at the top. Click the cross on each one to delete it. Then open safari and drag each of the lousy little pages up. They disappear. On mine the last two wouldn’t drag but when I quit safari and opened it again they were all gone. I hope it stays like that.