OK - the delay in Safari may not be due to the iOS. Computers use 'full duplex' communications - when you type a character on the keyboard in Safari, it's sent over the Internet to the website, which then 'echoes' that character all the way back to your iPad, which then displays it on the screen. So everything you type traverses the Internet between your iPad and the website twice, before it's displayed on the screen.
This seemingly silly arrangement is there so that the website can modify the character that you type - for example when typing a password it can choose not to send back to your screen the character that you type, but rather a '*' or something similar.
So the delay between you typing and the character appearing on the screen might not necessarily be down to the iPad, it could be a slow Internet link or heavily loaded web server.
In terms of Safari 'crashing' this is caused by Safari running out of system memory or RAM. The iPad1 only has 256MB RAM (the iPad2 has 512MB) and, when the page that's being loaded up exceeds the available RAM, Safari 'crashes' back to the Home screen. You can 'improve' the situation by occasionally switching off the iPad completely by holding down the Power button. When the iPad powers up from being switched completely off (rather than simply being put to sleep by a brief press of the Power button) it does a whole load of 'tidying up', one part of which is to reclaim RAM from apps that no longer need it and by removing non-active apps from RAM. This frees up a whole load of RAM which Safari can use - making it far less likely to 'crash'.
Tim
