safari iOS 8.1 freeze and slow

I feel sorry for the folks going to the stores on Black Friday sales. iPad miniI advertised in many of them. Little do they know their new purchase ihas been made obsolete . maybe they will come loaded with ios 7. Neat trick Apple.. Unless it's been changed ios8 will download anyway. If they don't install it will take up half of their storage.

Robert Martin....

Apologies for offending by calling your reply silly. There are almost 600 contacts on this "IOS 8.1.1 runs slowly and freezes" which suggests there may be many others out there who have not found the site or who haven't figured out there is a problem with this Apple upgrade. Your suggestion for solving our problem parallels what Apple online help says. Strip out the content, operating system and reset the iPad.

Some who have tried that have succeeded. Some have not succeeded. Apple should not be imposing that kind of draconian solution on its customers in 2014. If you would listen to my "silly suggestion" Apple should recall IOS 8.0 and 8.1.1 as GM does with vehicles that blow up. They should provide a patch that enables us to restore IOS 7.0 (which presumably would work with the many interfaces it must) and put good code writers to work fixing this deeply flawed piece of software. Anything less than that is a betrayal of the superb Apple legacy.

Sturges

I get all that, Sturges. I just didn't understand what you meant when you said that your iPad worked 'perfectly' under different WiFi.

I get the frustration. But it was the same under Steve Jobs and even before him - back to the Mac Quadra. The first iPod had a whine that was never admitted to - just quietly fixed after six long months of messages like this. Apple has always been this way.

SO back to the matter at hand. DOES your iPad work 'perfectly' on different WiFi from an alternate carrier? info like that seems as if it would be important with respect to finding a fix.

And FWIW, I agree that there should be a downgrade to 7 path for those who need to go back. I sure wanted it before I got my iPad Mini worked out.

bob

I ran a few tests comparing my iPad 2 on 7.1, my iPad mini and iPad mini retina both on 8.1.1. Previously, with 8.1, the iPad mini retina had been loading pages at about the same speed as the iPad 2 running 7.1. Now, with the iPad mini retina on 8.1.1, its about 20% faster than the iPad 2. It used to be a night and day difference. These are just eyeball numbers, no stop-watch or anything. I use CNET as my test page and count when all the graphics have settled as the stop point. I clear the cache before each test so the page has to load entirely.

Then I compared the iPad 2 to the iPad mini (non retina). Remember, these two machines have basically the same memory and processor. The iPad mini on 8.1.1 takes about 2x the time to load a page as the iPad 2 on 7.1. So I conclude that iOS 8.1 slowed Safari by somewhat more than 2x, followed by an about 20% improvement with 8.1.1, speeding it up to just 2x slower than 7.1 on page loads.

Links on Amazon still take presses under 8.1.1, not just taps, to work. I tried this on multiple iPad mini's at the Apple store during the 8.1 revision. All were requiring presses, not taps, on links on the Amazon website. I haven't been back since the 8.1.1 upgrade, but wouldn't expect to see any differences.

I only had Google links hang on me once under 8.1, and never yet under 8.1.1, though this doesn't mean it won't happen.

Other issues I ran into with 8.1 haven't been thoroughly checked out since the 8.1.1 update. One was interesting. With GPS geofence running, my iPad mini retina sometimes wouldn't activate the keyboard to enable password entry when turned on with the smart cover; the keyboard would appear on the screen but wouldn't take any input. This happened while I was sitting outside the local Apple store, and nowhere else, hence the link to the geofence. I could get the keyboard back up and running by toggling the power on/off switch.

I've got about 280 apps on each iPad, and have the memory 80-90% full on all of them. I don't use push, but have GPS, LTE, and bluetooth up and running. My home WIFI runs about about 30Mbps download and 25Mbps upload as tested by Speediest on the iPads.

For most of us the whole point behind the iPad is simplicity and ease of maintenance. As soon as one has to deal with doing a clean install and testing apps on-by-one one has already defeated the purpose of the device. I for one would prefer to put up with poor performance than time consuming maintenance and would prefer to revert to iOS 7 to either. Why would I want to go through the labor of backing up my iPad and reinstalling my apps on speculation that it mght solve the problem when if I did the same and reinstalled iOS 7 I KNOW it would work?

One poster has suggested that the problem is with Facebook. Which version of Facebook? What was the test sequence? What was the machine configuration? HOW do you KNOW it was really Facebook? These are questions that a QA Department is equipped to answer but a user doesn't have the resources to deal with properly or systematically.

It's not my job to be the QA department for Apple and the amount of effort required to get the machine working properly is potentially greater than the cost of the machine.

I subscribe to everything you say. Currently I'm completely fed up with the tedious troubleshooting procedures and still laggy and sometimes atrociously slow performance of Safari under iOS 8. I just had it loading a page with a lot of photos for about a MINUTE! And even after that the page couldn't be scrolled smoothly and continously reloaded partially. The same page on my iPhone 4S under iOS 7.1.2 loaded almost as quickly as I could scroll and scrolling itself was a breeze without annoying reloading. But I'm not in the mood for another factory reset again and leave things as they are. And I wholeheartedly agree that this kind of lengthy troubleshooting is not the kind of quality I've come to expect from Apple. It actually reminds me of my worst nightmares with Win 95 and 98 machines back in the 90ies. Actually the experience is even worse as iOS is pretty much inaccessible for the end user and makes troubleshooting a ridiculous trial and error procedure.

However, as I'm not inclined to buy a new tablet any time soon I just decided to get the best possible performance out of my iPad rather than binning it. Knowing that there are many others in the same situation I tried to share that advice as Apple's support happens to be pretty sketchy once you are out of warranty and don't want to pay (they tried to make me pay for support when I encountered the bug that my movies didn't sync and play properly anymore after the iOS 8 update).

If Apple carries on like this it's only a matter of time until their competitors do not only offer equivalent but superior products. As mentioned before, my next tablet might pretty well be a Microsoft Surface 3. If it's just for the accessible OS and the standard interfaces (USB, SD reader, Display Port) that are so sorely missing from the iPad anyways.

Unfortunately I have to agree, the reason we choose an Apple ipad was it just worked well with no user intervention. We are looking at getting a new tablet anyway but after the IOS8 experience this has gone from automatically looking at Apple to seriously considering the alternatives.

A roll back to IOS 7 May change that view but going by the present experience that is very unlikely.

I thought I had my issues halfways sorted out (see above) and now it starts all over again. Safari has slowed down to a barely noticeable crawl; I can frequently spend minutes watching the blue loading bar stuck in the middle of nowhere above a blank page. Grabbing my iOS 7.1.2 iPhone some 20 seconds later and trying to open the same non-cached site on the same network connection brings it up some 30 seconds earlier than the iPad. If the latter just doesn't return a timeout error despite a full strength WiFi signal and perfectly working internet connection. Same for online streaming (BBC iPlayer app - not Safari), streams seem to start normally but get randomly stuck, not downloading/caching any content any longer. It also happens when watching YouTube or alike in Safari. Sometimes this hung progress can be fixed by toggling pause and play repeatedly but not always. This is a simply unbelievable p*** poor performance.

All I did was updating two apps on the App Store that were not network connectivity related at all, no new app installed, no iOS features enabled or disabled. I think I'm going to sell this piece of aluminium and glass junk my iPad has turned into on eBay asap as long as someone might still be willing to pay for it and get me something else instead. But for sure no Apple iSomething product again. I have had it with that ****!

I wish you luck! Seeing as how Sturges has indicated his is a WiFi issue, is it possible that is the problem here as well?

As I've indicated - my earliest attempts at a wipe-and-start-from-scratch were unsuccessful when I restored from iTunes. When I set it up as new, it worked. When I restored from iTunes, I had problems again. When I did the same thing and restored from the Cloud, I was good until I launched Facebook. When I noticed how it lagged, I noticed how the rest of the system lagged. I KNOW I am beating a dead horse here and again apologize, but can only speak to my repeatable experiences in trying to get an iPad Mini that works.

But first, if there IS a WiFi problem that causes the same basic symptoms, I suppose it would be a good idea to determine if that's affecting you.

We haven't heard back from Sturges, though, to see if that's what he was actually saying.

Bob

I have a standard WiFi router running on a ADSL 16,000 Internet connection. Everything else in my house (iPhone 4S, MacBook 13 Retina, iMac 27, Dell ATG D630 laptop and an old custom-built Win XP industry mainboard 468 lab computer) operates flawlessly on this particular WiFi and Internet connection apart from - occasionally - the stupid iPad. So if it should actually be a WiFi issue Apple must have done something really bad, undocumented and non-user-accessible in iOS 8's network setup. Not a very comforting thought at all.

As I'm typing this on the newly restored iPad in its vanilla factory state without anything added but my Apple-ID I just opened that particular photo page once more and things have improved a little but I wouldn't call them good. Performance is nowhere close to iOS 7. Also already noticed that stuttering and lagging switching between apps and home screen that came with iOS 8. I'm professionally into tech including a certain amount of IT as well and this for sure looks like a device running out of available memory. As long as everything is still in the "perfect world" condition of a freshly installed iOS 8 things might still be acceptable even on older devices; but it seems as if the dirty real world (app & configuration) environment has some unpleasant surprises readily available here.

I particularly fail to understand what has apparently trashed my iPad between yesterday and today from acceptable performance to mere unusability. But as iOS doesn't give the end-user any means of exploring its innards I'll most likely never find out.

After spending more than two hours with customer support on this I came to the realization that Apple is not going to help me with this except on terms that would burn up the clock and create frustration with no guarantee of success. I can not change Apple. If Apple choses to release a defective product and leave me with the burden of trouble shooting their mistakes that is beyond my control.

I hate to see fellow posters thrashing about trying to solve this instead of enjoying their weekend. When I see someone repeatly resetting their iPad and trying new things without any gaurentee of success it gives me great pain. If someone suddenly drove over your brief case with the iPad in it and refused to be responsible you would just accept that it is broken beyond repair and that the person who did it was not going to take ownership.

if Apple helps us it will be on their own time and on their own terms. It is not fair but it is the reality.

Agreed!

But disabling JavaScript in Safari DOES restore previously speedy performance, albeit with other intolerable issues!

Now, not for one second am I suggesting this as a solution, IT IS NOT, but it does, for me at least, point DIRECTLY to where this issue REALLY LIES.

And before we go down the route of blaming third party Apps which, incidentally, is something that should be caught by Apple anyway*, I factory restored my iPad through iTunes with the release of 8.1.1 - effectively making it out-of-the-box and have yet to install a single App, and guess what?, Safari is still S-L-O-W!

*For the nay-sayers that will argue "Apple can't monitor every third party developer App" - I say "Have you tried submitting an App for approval?!" - It's an extremely painful, tedious, long-winded, specification intensive process, so no real excuses for Apple not to catch rogue Apps!

Did the same iTunes restore to a factory fresh iOS 8.1.1 with my iPad 3 and my observation is identical. Safari still is a major dog as it has serious issues with demanding websites that are loading a lot of data such as high resolution photographs and links on many websites are reacting sluggish, unconventional (e.g. no visual actuation feedback) and sometimes not at all which also points into the direction of JavaScript. Overall the iPad's performance is also still noticeably worse than under iOS 7.1.2. Adding my relatively few apps didn't cause any further deterioration so it can be safely said that iOS 8 is at the core of the problem.

However having come this far matters are now pretty much completely out of end-user hands - only Apple could fix these issues; and as a previous poster remarked, they'll do it on their own time and terms if they are going to act at all. For the moment it's just "Wait and See" and living with what we still got.

FWIW, my Mini seems to be back in the saddle (as does my wife's), doing what I've posted elsewhere in this link.

I have Time Warner service with a Broadband Extreme account into the house (30 down, 5 up), and an Airport Extreme with an Airport Express extending the network to the other end of a long single-story house. I use custom DNS Servers as theirs seem to be suspect.

There are four Macs, two iPhone 6s, one iPhone 3s (operating as an iPod), two iPad Minis, an Apple TV, and a Roku on that network. I have loaded every app back into my Mini, save Facebook. Perhaps it's a tad slower than iOS 7 was, but not much - not enough to impact my enjoyment. Seems to be stable. An OCCASIONAL web page crashes, usually because it's loaded with animated ads and popup pleas to join, such as the Huffington Post. I have had no apps crash - and that was a common occurrence with 8.0/8.02/8.1. Cut and paste across the board is fine. I have been reticent to load Facebook back in. Seems my life is actually richer without paying so much attention to Facebook - imagine that!

So, despite the fact that my own problems (and my wife's on her Mini) being solved, I've still made a point of featuring this thread in the Apple Community Lounge and been keeping that thread active to point people here. It seems that it's NOT a widespread problem. The folks in there represent a wide swath of highly active people who use Apple's products (as well as an Apple moderator) and I was surprised to see how many were unaware of these issues and responded that all was well, particularly after 8.1.1. So, whatever is going on would appear to be more micro than macro.

The point of this post is that this doesn't appear to be epidemic, but it's still an issue. With Sturges singling out a specific WiFi provider vs Apple (even though his other stuff works fine), I thought that MAY be a possible avenue to explore.

I guess all we CAN do is relate our own experiences and hope that there are others who can be aided by them and hope that we/Apple discovers what the issues are with this subset of iOS8 users as soon as humanly possible.

Bob