ipad misbehaving, ipad slow and safari crashes and does random things

I've been having trouble with my ipad air for the last few months. It periodically gets sluggish and apps just exit. I notice this mostly when I use safari, since I usually just browse on my ipad, or maybe the tivo app. Safari also randomly opens up new tabs when I click links, which often want to install new apps or take me to some random place. This kind of seems like virus behavior, only I see in these forums that viruses on iOS are rare or impossible(?). I tried updating to the latest iOS. The only thing that seems to help is wiping everything and starting from scratch, which cleans things up for a little while. Any other ideas? Maybe defective and time to upgrade to iPad Pro?