Maybe iPadOS Safari was the problem

TidBITS Talk
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For those exposed to my NordVPN on iPadOS saga, you know the issue was nearly blank screen after tapping Log In. I couldn’t identify the app as there were only some icons across the top. So after lots of troubleshooting steps I erased and installed iPadOS over several hours (still setup work to go) and chose Safari as default Browser.

And egads, first time I go to use it, I open a Private browsing tab, type a search in the top center field, and… same thing! blank black screen after momentary blue line progress under the search term. Tried in a non-Private tab. Same thing.

So for some reason now Safari is not working on iPadOS 26.2 on my mini 6.

I went thru Settings for the app, and yes I do turn off a lot of the settings, but JavaScript is on, and my default search engine is DuckDuckGo.

Now I’ll try Firefox (which is as I recently read only a facelift to Safari)… And it works pretty much fine and has a range of different settings than Safari has.

So… I don’t know what Safari on iPadOS is dependent on, not being a developer, but I have turned off many buttons that are ‘allowed’ (as they are in the Settings) to be off but it could be any of the dozens are stopping Safari from being usable at all.

I’m rather inclined now to use Firefox as default.

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Update: Gave Safari another chance on both iPads after restarting but it continued to show a quick blue underline of the search/url field followed by… blank nothing. Same attempt on Firefox showed desired web content moments later.

Was able to delete Safari (thought it wouldn’t be allowed) from both. Somewhere down the road might try it again after some restarts and such.