Haven't had safari crashing, though I'm not a big time surfer.
Did have the ipad completely die on me last night though and it took a couple of minutes to try and boot it back up again (holding down buttons just weren't doing it) - I thought the battery was dead, but then after putting the charger in it and persisting with the buttons it finally came back to life, showing 80% charge and no clue what caused it to crash except for a resetcounters report under diagnostics.
Battery usage seems unaffected to me (though that's my expectation).