[OtinG]

I no longer have a Mac that can be upgraded beyond Big Sur. My MacBook Pro 2014 and Mac mini 2012 are too old to be supported, which is understandable.

There of course is a huge difference between Safari on a larger screen like a MacBook Pro or a monitor (which is even bigger) versus a small screen of an iPad. Even the largest iPad Pro still has a fairly small screen compared to Macs, and quite honestly only a small percentage of iPad owners even have the larger iPads. So with the greater amount of screen space, the sidebar isn't much of a problem, if any. On my MacBook Pro 15" I leave the Safari sidebar visible almost always, unless I decrease the over all size of the Safari screen to have two apps visible at once, which is rare. On the smaller iPad screens though the sidebar can make reading web pages more difficult, so it is often better to close it. Hopefully they will fix the issue of having to press multiple times to get it open and close and to re-navigate to the bookmark place you were previously. That, and the new tab layout, are getting a lot of pushback from users.

One thing that frustrates me the most about iPadOS is there isn't a true file system. On a computer or Android tablet you can copy files and move them around and the apps can read those files and locate them. That is a standard feature on every computer system and OS going back to way before I was even born, and I’m 63! But on iPadOS apps cannot usually read the locations where some files are stored. For example, create a stand-alone HTML file and place it in Files. Try to open that in Safari and it opens only in stripped down viewer. You can’t even bookmark the location in the Safari app. A few coding apps like Koder can find and open your HTML file, and display it, but FireFox and Chrome can’t see files in Files. WTF Apple, this is the simplest thing but they can’t make it work. Files is almost as useless as teats on a boar hog! There is no excuse for Apple making it nearly impossible to store PDFs, HTML, TXT, JPEG, PNG, and other commonly used types of files in a location that can be easily accessed and read by apps. Apple is purposely hamstringing iPadOS. And Apple has absolutely no concept of photos and file types. Their photo organizer app is total crap. And since you cannot actually manage it yourself via a useable file system, it too is hamstringed.

If you want entertainment then the iPadOS is great. If you want to work with standard file types within a useable file system that can work with other devices like almost all other OSes in the computer industry do, then you are basically screwed. Hell, it is difficult to even tell what the file name or type is, whether it is a JPEG or PNG, etc. What a mess...