This is a genuine issue, and it's extremely dysfunctional. This response is dismissive, and not particularly helpful.
lkrupp wrote:
Never, EVER, ignore updates unless you don’t value your personal data.
I value the functionality of my phone beyond some obscure data exploit that barely anyone will ever run into, I think the main priority should be not to make a vital app like Safari essentially unusable.
And no, Safari works perfectly well on both my iPhone13 and iPad running 16.5
Hey that's great. I hope you understand how little that actually means. The question was "is anyone else having that issue?" — The answer is yes.
Since iOS 16.5, every time I come back into Safari, it hangs. It's completely unresponsive. I have to wait some time for the app to crash out, before it can be successfully relaunched. Closing it by up-swiping doesn't resolve the issue. The OS needs to see the app has become unresponsive and then terminate it.
This is extremely annoying. Annoying enough to make someone re-think doing updates automatically, or in a timely manner. As of 16.5.1 this still hasn't been fixed, so it really will discourage people from updating.
No amount of "EVER EVER EVER" on your part will change that.
Restarting the device doesn't help. Clearing history and cookies doesn't help (and only adds to the annoyance). This is a genuine issue.
It's hard enough to get people to take security seriously without basically the largest tech company in the world, who trades on their products "just working" putting out updates which disable major apps for some users.
Thankfully I'm not experiencing this on my iPad Pro, but my iPhone 14 Pro Max running iOS 16.5.1 is an extremely frustrating device to use now, because of this issue.
Nothing worse than internet pollution from tech "helpers" who dismiss anything that isn't happening directly to them. It's just noise.