How do I force quit Safari and return to the homepage on iPad Pro?

Apple made multitasking work a whole lot like macOS including a menu bar in Safari.

To get to the menu bar, pull down from just off-screen from top center. You can hide Safari from there.

To return to the icon view, swipe up from off-screen bottom center. A quick gesture just hides the app, while a up-from-below gesture held can get to the app picker and can also be used to force-quit the app.

There are other ways and other gestures and other settings:

• Multitask on iPad with iPadOS 26 - Apple Support

Sparkgapper wrote:

That's nice but it does not address my situation.

Basically, Safari is LOCKED into the last website I went to and it does not matter how many times I turn it off and back on or how long it sits in the screen off??, cover closed. mode. when I hit the icon for my safari it comes up on that same website.

Safari maintains open tabs on app and iPad restart and even across iPadOS updates, yes.

Safari doesn’t lock tabs (or tab groups, or profiles, or the various windows open in Safari). They’re all preserved until the tab is closed too, or the tab is used for some other web page. (Not locked!)

Tap the + in the upper right to open a new (empty) tab.

Or tap and hold on a link and select Open in Background to open a new tab for that link in the background.

You can then tap on the tab along the top to view the tab contents.

Or you can enter the website in the search bar, or enter a new search, on that same tab.

Or pull down from top center of Safari to open the macOS-style menus and see the many operations available there.

To view Safari settings, use Settings > Apps > Safari

To access other apps, pull up from bottom center of the iPad display (this is part of multitasking and works the same across all iPad apps) and you’ll see the iPad home page and app icons. Or pull up from bottom center and hold, and you’ll see recently-active apps.

Some options for learning how Safari works include the guide, and the (free) iPad Product classes offered at many Apple Stores as part of the Today at Apple program.

Apple long ago decided that managing and particularly closing iPad apps was not something they wanted users to have to deal with. iPadOS manages and closes apps as appropriate, and app developers are accustomed to their apps getting backgrounded and then getting automatically exited. This doesn’t require a user to manage the apps.

As for Safari on iPad, here is how that works: Browse the web using Safari on iPad - Apple Support