Safari crashes on iPad after ios 5 update

"Will add any developments beyond what is already here ASAP."

Please don't. This is a technical user-to-user technical forum, not a place to vent your frustrations, which is against the Terms of Use that you Greed to when you signed up.

WTH! It sounded to me as if Jim Ewing is only going to report his experience vis a vis his call to Tech Support. That sounds technical to me. Wow, I realize we're not to talk about unrelated subjects here but you seem overly sensitive to Jim's comments. We're all a bit frustrated here and have been trying to find solutions to our very real tech issues which Apple isn't responding to. I've been to my genius bar twice after trying tech solutions here. I've twice had my iPad restored as a new iPad. I'd be interested what other people here say tech support is telling them to do. I'd say that's part of the mission of these forums. Geez.

Agreed! Jim is at least willing to share a solution, if one is forthcoming. Of course, none of this would be necessary if Apple would provide the customer service we've come to expect but have yet to see.

I'm also experiencing this problem - it's making my iPad 1 unusable for web-browsing (which was its main purpose)

Is there any way to 'downgrade' the software to a more stable OS?

I am out of my warranty period. Other than send a report, is there anything else I could do to draw this to Apple's attention?

As a followup to my previous post(s), I was able to talk to an Apple Tier II support engineer regarding the problem of Safari crashing under iOS 5.0.1. I provided him with a simple test web page he could use to reliably reproduce the problem. He advises that I am not an isolated case and that the problem has been referred to the Apple development team for resolution. He provided me with a case number for follow-up. At least I can confirm that Apple is aware of the issue and is looking into it at a technical level. Hopefully there will be a solution on the near horizon.

Thanks for posting Hank. I spoke with a regular support person this morning. There was no mention of this as a recognized issue. The instructions were to do a local backup, then full restore to factory original settings with a fresh iOS download and then restore apps from the backup. If that will not fix it, it is a hardware problem.

I am doing the full restore now. I have a case number. If it is not cured, I'll follow up with Apple and post anything remotely useful I find here.

Thanks for getting back Hank. It's good to know that Apple is aware of the problem and is working on it. It is pretty frustrating that they are also giving others with the same problem instructions to restore, which is time consuming and apparently unneccessary (has a restore worked for anyone? I know some have posted that it didnt).

It would be nice if they just told us there was a problem; maybe they will after Christmas...

It is true that the Tier I (regular) support folks don't know about this and many other issues. In reality, most of them don't have much technical expertise and I get the distinct impression that they don't receive much information from corporate on technical issues. They are basically there to support sales and that's about all most of them are good for. If they can't solve a problem by doing a reset, reload, or restore then the problem is out of their hands - you'll be told NTF (no trouble found) or the problem is on your end as was my experience.

While it is plausible for a restore to fix Safari related problems (there can be many), I can confirm that a restore will not fix the JavaScript bug in the webkit - the web foundation that Safari uses. The only workaround that I'm aware of is to use a 3rd party browser that does not rely on the webkit. Most 3rd party browsers that run on the iPad use the iOS 5 webkit so don't invest in a different browser unless you've confirmed with the developer that it doesn't use the webkit.

I noticed that a few other issues crept into this thread. There is a related thread that is more general and addresses quite a few different iOS 5 issues and offers some fixes to specific issues that might be valuable. The thread is here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3411930?tstart=0

I'll post an update when I hear back from Tier II support.

Thanks Hank. I've been having this issue on a regular basis. It seems to be getting worse and I cannot detect a pattern of what triggers it. Hope it gets resolved soon!

I've been having the same problem, and I think the issue is due to the limited memory ont the original iPad (the iPhone 4 and iPad 2 have double the memory of the original iPad). I'm an App developer, and so I am often looking at crash logs. If the program dies because of some bug inside the program, a crash report is generated. If it dies because there was not enough memory and the OS decides it needs to terminate the App, then no crash report is generated.

I'm having lots of Apps crash often without leaving crash logs, so at least for my iPad, I think the issue is running out of memory.

I saw somewhere that having lots of Apps installed on your device might exacerbate the problem (I have a couple hundred Apps installed), although as a programmer myself, I can't imagine why this should matter since most of the programs are not running and presumably when the foreground app is killed, all background apps are killed first.

Rebooting the iPad helps temporarily, although this is far from a solution as rebooting is annoying, and it doesn't fix things for long.

I think turning off some services like iCloud helps reduce the memory used by the OS, so that might also be useful if you don't care about iCloud (this is not an option for me as I make heavy use of iCloud).

It's interesting that your iPad doesn't generate a crash report. My iPad 1 does. The reports always say the same thing: low memory followed by the date and .plist. The genius at my local genius bar stated that my ipad1 doesn't have enough ram for the iOS. This doesn't make sense to me. I have very few apps on my iPad after two complete restores (I choose not to upload most of my apps after the restores), I have friends who have many more apps on their ipad1 and have no crashes. This is what makes this issue so frustrating. There are some users who are experiencing no problems. Don't we all have the same amount of ram on our devices? 256 MB, right? And what about the iPad 2 owners here who've had similar issues? Something else is going on. Maybe it is iCloud, but that's the main reason for the upgrade! So we can have all our devices in the Cloud. BTW, after two complete wipes and restoring as new iPad, it's crashing, loading old cache and calendar is blank upon opening just as before.

I, too, agree that it is primarily a memory problem (closing tabs on Safari makes the thing just a little bit more useable). Thus I am still baffled as to why Apple has forced an upgrade of the iPad1 to iOS5 at all -- its mantra is unified (standardized) platform and hardware, so they only had to do some testing.

Anyway, please leave a feedback on Apple.com and pray that Apple comes back to their senses.

The iPad specialist who said that your iPad doesn't have enough memory for the iOS is not very well informed. Apple knows how much memory the original iPad has, and it is the one that encouraged upgrading to iOS5. You are right that all original iPads have 256MB.

As far as the iPad 2 owners who are having problems, I suspect their problems are different than mine. I run a system utility tool on my original iPad, and after reboot I have about 80Mb of free memory. The iPad 2 has about 300 Mb free on reboot. 80Mb is not very much, while 300 Mb is plenty for most iOS apps.

I do wish that Apple hadn't skimped on the memory for the original iPad. It will become obsolete soon because of the memory issues.

The predominant problem with the original iPads seems to be memory related from what I'm reading on the forums. I can confirm however that in my case I've got iPad 2's with 64 gigabytes of memory in them. They're all crashing so bad that they're unusable. I don't have any 3rd party apps loaded on them. They're completely stock. It seems that there are a lot of problems with iOS 5, all manifesting as crashing applications.

Also, to add to your comments, I don't get crash logs when Safari crashes making me fairly confident that the problem is at the OS level (the webkit). As such, I think it is the webkit that is exiting and Safari never has a chance to report an exception because it was completely unaware that the exception occurred. If you can point me to perhaps a debug or diagnostics utility that you use, I'll be happy to purchase a copy and dig deeper. I too am a developer but not with iOS - more .NET, Linux, and UNIX server based web applications and core services.

I heard from Tier II support today. They suggested that I open a developer's TSI (technical support incident). I wrote back and reiterated that I'm not developing apps for the iPad but rather trying to solve a problem with the iPad not working with our web based products. Perhaps a TSI is the way to go but I'm afraid that after spending the money to be able to file a TSI, they'll tell me that a TSI isn't the correct way to file a bug report on native Apple applications. Can you advise me if a TSI would be the correct way to address this with Apple? Thanks.

Hank LV, the memory discussed here refers to the system memory (which is 256MB for iPad1). When you say your iPad2 has 64GB, it means its flash capacity. Think RAM and HDD in computer terms.