Overlapping of words

Some websites don’t appear to play nicely with the the new iPadOS webkit engine - and sometimes do not render correctly. Many reports, like yours, have been seen today - suggesting that the issue is currently changes being made by the webpage provider.

There are two workarounds that usually resolve the problem.

1) Simply rotate the iPad orientation from Portrait to Landscape - or vice versa. The page often redraws correctly.

2) For affected websites, change the Safari default “desktop” setting to “mobile”.

• Tap the aA icon at the left-end of the address bar
• Tap Website Settings
• Turn-off Request Desktop Website
• Tap Done

This change will only influence the affected website - other pages will continue to render using your default settings.

Hopefully, as incidence of this issue is not uncommon, either affected websites and/or Apple will resolve this issue with a code change at some point in the future.

I hope you find this to be helpful in resolving your website rendering problem.

More than likely that is a problem with how the website is coded, and it is not coded correctly for mobile browsers or to scale for mobile browsers. Try going to Settings>Safari>Clear History and Website Data, then try going to the page again.

I’ll try to keep this answer as simple and meaningful as possible without losing too much technical detail.

Previous versions of iOS (and iOS13.x for iPhone) always operate as a Mobile browser by default - requesting that webpages, where optimised for a smaller screen, would be rendered in preference to the full desktop version of the page. If the requested webpage did not have an optimised version available, then the full (~desktop) page would be rendered. An option exists to request to the Desktop version of the page. The User Agent presents itself as iOS.

iPadOS Safari turns this operating paradigm on its head. The iPadOS 13.x Safari browser can operate in two modes - either Desktop or Mobile browser. By default, Safari now requests the full Desktop version of webpages, with an option to instead request the mobile version of a page.

iPadOS provides much more control over the webpage that is requested; the operating mode can changed/set on a per-page basis (this is the basis of the workaround described in #2 above). The User Agent essentially presents itself as MacOS Catalina, upon which its code is based (i,e, your iPad “pretends” to be an Apple Mac computer).

It would appear that some websites have changed the way that they are coding their “full desktop” pages - and this is causing difficulties for Safari Webkit (this is the underlying rendering engine that builds the page on your screen) rendering of the page on your screen. The described workaround, requesting the “mobile” page, seems to resolve the immediate issue - pending:

a) a further change to websites that remove the problem; it is not in a commercial website operator’s interest to prevent revenue-generating content from being displayed.

b) an update to Safari Webkit to resolve the rendering problem.

It might be worth pointing out that choosing the mobile version of a page, in preference to the full desktop version, can significantly reduce unwanted bandwidth-hungry content - making page rendering much more efficient. This may be of considerable importance when using a “metered” cellular connection (such as you mobile phone). Contrary to popular misconception, requesting the mobile version of a site should not provide a “second class” experience; this choice merely affects efficiency and rendering of content where the website operator provides a choice.

I hope this explanation is helpful in answering your final question.