Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
So does the 2GB of RAM fix Safari refresh?

In my 6+, safari refreshes after three tabs. I open up to 16 tabs in my air 2, still no refresh . However, when switch app and come back to Safari, it will reload pages.
 
I've just tried your test, opened the T-Mobile page you linked to (along with this thread and 5 other tabs also open). I can click between them, and then reply here without a problem.

I actually typed the above and then clicked across all 6 of the tabs and then back here.

No problem whatsoever, no reloading, and my reply box remained as it should.

I'm happy for you, but I'm not the only one experiencing this, even with 2GB of RAM. And I can also get an iPad Air with 1GB to not have these issues either. I still say RAM isn't the full solution when bug fixes and better memory management are.

----------

In this "test", what other apps were loaded on the iPad? Only real comparison is to do the test after a reboot on clean iPads.

So "normal" use now to reboot clean every time one uses Safari, regardless of the RAM amount? Good to know. Next time anyone complains of lag or other issues, I'll just accuse them of not aving rebooted in the past 5 seconds or so. Thanks!
 
Is there still a limit to the number of tabs opened before Safari start to close the oldest tab? Chrome in Android doesn't do that and essentially have unlimited tabs. With my old iPhone 5, I think it was about 10 tabs before the oldest one was closed upon opening a new tab.

No one here knows?
 
So "normal" use now to reboot clean every time one uses Safari, regardless of the RAM amount? Good to know. Next time anyone complains of lag or other issues, I'll just accuse them of not aving rebooted in the past 5 seconds or so. Thanks!

It's amazing the lengths people will go to, to defend apple's "honor"

I've talked at length of my miseries with tabs refreshing on my air. Can't reliably type a response here in macrumors and look at one other tab without reloads. And yes, with ONLY safari running.
 
No one here knows?

I don't believe there's a limit on tabs on the iPad. Seems like it used to be 12 though.

However, I have noticed with 8.1 on my iPad 4 that safari reloads tabs less often now. It was bad on 8.0.2 and would reload with 4 open. I can now have 10+ tabs open and I am rarely seeing a refresh. These are primarily reddit and imgur links so they aren't extremely complex pages. However, the fact remains that this is a lot better with 8.1. This is generally with email, calendar, and Twitter open.
 
Does anybody notice even apps that always closed upon exit now sometimes stay open on the Air 2? It's crazy loving it
 
The Air 1 is a cool bit of tech but frankly a PITA for getting anything remotely productive done! I've had mine for a few weeks now and it's caused real problems with lost data on several occasions - at times to the point of me saying "**** it" and firing up the Windows machine to finish the job.

Personally, I believe all devices of this type should have upgradeable RAM, storage and replaceable batteries. You wouldn't buy a car with a sealed engine bay and riveted brake pads...

I fear >two decades of form/function compromise and sycophantic consensus have allowed Apple to enjoy continued success despite sailing closer to dogma than to acumen.
 
I don't believe there's a limit on tabs on the iPad. Seems like it used to be 12 though.

However, I have noticed with 8.1 on my iPad 4 that safari reloads tabs less often now. It was bad on 8.0.2 and would reload with 4 open. I can now have 10+ tabs open and I am rarely seeing a refresh. These are primarily reddit and imgur links so they aren't extremely complex pages. However, the fact remains that this is a lot better with 8.1. This is generally with email, calendar, and Twitter open.

I'm not talking about refresh now. The last time I used an iOS device before moving to Android, iOS will close the oldest tabs once a certain limit was reached. Have this changed at all in light of iOS 8 and the Air 2 having 2GB of RAM. Android truly have unlimited tabs. I don't need to have hundreds of tabs opened on a mobile device. Although I have at one point opened 825 tabs on my Nexus 4. Of course not all of the tabs were active, but I liked how the oldest tab wasn't automatically closed. Is it truly unlimited with the Air 2? Since you have an iPad 4, I don't know if you can even test this. Can you see if you can have 15 or even 20 tabs opened?
 
It's amazing the lengths people will go to, to defend apple's "honor"

I've talked at length of my miseries with tabs refreshing on my air. Can't reliably type a response here in macrumors and look at one other tab without reloads. And yes, with ONLY safari running.

Sell your air and move on

----------

I'm not talking about refresh now. The last time I used an iOS device before moving to Android, iOS will close the oldest tabs once a certain limit was reached. Have this changed at all in light of iOS 8 and the Air 2 having 2GB of RAM. Android truly have unlimited tabs. I don't need to have hundreds of tabs opened on a mobile device. Although I have at one point opened 825 tabs on my Nexus 4. Of course not all of the tabs were active, but I liked how the oldest tab wasn't automatically closed. Is it truly unlimited with the Air 2? Since you have an iPad 4, I don't know if you can even test this. Can you see if you can have 15 or even 20 tabs opened?

Who cares move on and play with your Nexus
 
I'm not talking about refresh now. The last time I used an iOS device before moving to Android, iOS will close the oldest tabs once a certain limit was reached. Have this changed at all in light of iOS 8 and the Air 2 having 2GB of RAM. Android truly have unlimited tabs. I don't need to have hundreds of tabs opened on a mobile device. Although I have at one point opened 825 tabs on my Nexus 4. Of course not all of the tabs were active, but I liked how the oldest tab wasn't automatically closed. Is it truly unlimited with the Air 2? Since you have an iPad 4, I don't know if you can even test this. Can you see if you can have 15 or even 20 tabs opened?

The limit on my iPad Air 1 is 36 tabs which I'm pretty sure is an increase from iOS 7. When you breach that limit it appears as though old tabs are dropped. In iOS 7 (and maybe 6) you could get your previous tab back by using the back button however, a little annoyingly, that feature seems to have been removed. I guess that they wanted to simplify the interface.
 
I'm not talking about refresh now. The last time I used an iOS device before moving to Android, iOS will close the oldest tabs once a certain limit was reached. Have this changed at all in light of iOS 8 and the Air 2 having 2GB of RAM. Android truly have unlimited tabs. I don't need to have hundreds of tabs opened on a mobile device. Although I have at one point opened 825 tabs on my Nexus 4. Of course not all of the tabs were active, but I liked how the oldest tab wasn't automatically closed. Is it truly unlimited with the Air 2? Since you have an iPad 4, I don't know if you can even test this. Can you see if you can have 15 or even 20 tabs opened?

Ok, I just opened 25 tabs. Some pretty heavy. Mostly news, forums, couple of Amazon....you can only read 10 tabs but the others are there if you drag the tabs to the right. At the 25th tab the first one reloaded when I selected it (happened to be this tab).

If I remember correctly the old limit was 9, but I might be wrong. I do remember running up to it a bunch wheni was comparison shopping.
 
The limit on my iPad Air 1 is 36 tabs which I'm pretty sure is an increase from iOS 7. When you breach that limit it appears as though old tabs are dropped. In iOS 7 (and maybe 6) you could get your previous tab back by using the back button however, a little annoyingly, that feature seems to have been removed. I guess that they wanted to simplify the interface.

Thanks for the response. It's pretty disappointing that 36 is the limit on your Air 1. I don't understand why the old tabs are dropped. Apple could just make each tab use as less resources as possible when they're not being used.

----------

Ok, I just opened 25 tabs. Some pretty heavy. Mostly news, forums, couple of Amazon....you can only read 10 tabs but the others are there if you drag the tabs to the right. At the 25th tab the first one reloaded when I selected it (happened to be this tab).

If I remember correctly the old limit was 9, but I might be wrong. I do remember running up to it a bunch wheni was comparison shopping.

Thanks for the response. Is it possible for you to try to see if you can exceed 36 tabs? blackNBUK says 36 is the limit on his Air 1 before the old tabs are dropped. I'm hoping the limit is even higher on the Air 2 and hopefully truly unlimited.
 
Thanks for the response. It's pretty disappointing that 36 is the limit on your Air 1. I don't understand why the old tabs are dropped. Apple could just make each tab use as less resources as possible when they're not being used.

----------



Thanks for the response. Is it possible for you to try to see if you can exceed 36 tabs? blackNBUK says 36 is the limit on his Air 1 before the old tabs are dropped. I'm hoping the limit is even higher on the Air 2 and hopefully truly unlimited.

36. At that point the '+' to add new tabs was greyed out. When I clicked on a link on one of the others the first one dropped. I didn't check how long they were held in memory before a reload because I suspect that would depend on the sites.

Edit: just to clarify, I have an Air2 and I had no apps in the background.
 
Thanks for the response. It's pretty disappointing that 36 is the limit on your Air 1. I don't understand why the old tabs are dropped. Apple could just make each tab use as less resources as possible when they're not being used.

I would be very surprised if resources was the problem. Once a page is unloaded I would have thought that the only information that needed to be stored is the URL of the tab and any other pages in the history and a snapshot of the current page. That's a tiny amount of data by modern standards. I think the more likely answer is that Apple thinks that having too many tabs at once would make it easy for some users to lose track of what they were doing.
 
Getting a different type of problem with Air 2 that I wonder if is memory related...

Third time in two days when using 3/4 tabs, copying & pasting from one to another my Safari just locks up/freezes, goes non-responsive.

Only way I can get out of it is to kill Safari. It, of course, reloads the pages when restarted. :confused:
 
Thanks for the response. It's pretty disappointing that 36 is the limit on your Air 1. I don't understand why the old tabs are dropped. Apple could just make each tab use as less resources as possible when they're not being used.

----------
Remember each tab doesn't just include the data from the website it's also a completely isolated rendering engine of Safari. So it's like you're running Safari x number of times.

Getting a different type of problem with Air 2 that I wonder if is memory related...

Third time in two days when using 3/4 tabs, copying & pasting from one to another my Safari just locks up/freezes, goes non-responsive.

Only way I can get out of it is to kill Safari. It, of course, reloads the pages when restarted. :confused:

Definitely some bugs to be worked for the new A8X processor and extra ram in IOS 8.1. I'm sure in time Apple will straighten it out.
 
Thanks for the response. It's pretty disappointing that 36 is the limit on your Air 1. I don't understand why the old tabs are dropped. Apple could just make each tab use as less resources as possible when they're not being used...

Chrome is available on iOS. I don't know what the limit on it is, but it's more than 50. There's no particular reason it would be different than what you found on Android, so it probably doesn't have a specific limit.
 
I may have mentioned it elsewhere (can't remember), but I thought I'd share my results in this official thread.

I did the tab test, where you close out of everything and reboot and start with one tab and go from there cycling through each one and then opening a new one. I loaded some fairly intensive sites, like The Verge and similarly image bloated sites, along with a few less intensive sites like Amazon and MacRumors. I was able to get through 12 tabs, and on the 13th it reloaded. That's a success for me as I'd never have this many image-heavy tech sites open at once. So I ran the test again with sites that I'm more likely to have open on a daily basis. I made it to 16 tabs. On the 17th tab, it began reloading when cycling back around to the 12th tab. Not too bad, and much better than my iPhone 6 Plus which can manage only 2-3 tabs. This will be plenty.

The only other time I've had tabs reload is if I'm in another app doing intensive things for a long time, like Lightroom Mobile, and even then it usually keeps several of the tabs open. Safari does need some work. For instance, I have no idea why it can't save the entire state of all the tabs to the NAND and retrieve them later. It definitely seems like the NAND in this thing is a lot faster. Lightroom feels much more responsive and apps open faster—even ones that aren't already in RAM. But for now I'll accept this fix until Apple can do a proper one.

This fix has many benefits beyond Safari, such as enabling bigger drawing canvases with more layers, and hopefully we'll be able to do more advanced things in apps like Lightroom such as the adjustment brush and RAW camera import. I'm really excited to see what sorts of doors the extra RAM unlocks for us higher-end users, and hopefully we'll eventually get an iPad Pro that is even more powerful. I think the main point of a lot of this discussion and debate comes from the fact that consumers and professionals are sharing the same device right now. Once we get our own device we won't bother coming around these forums very often, lol.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.