I have a gen 1 ipad. Can’t get a OS upgrade anymore. Can’t watch youtube videos w/o going thru contortions .
For some months now it chokes often while trying to surf. Safari just stops.
My wife’s gen 2 , running a later OS chokes also. Not as often but similar.
It chokes on my iPad Air too. Will probably replace it with.a Surface Pro 4 when they come out. Not really a fair comparison, because the surface is a more expensive option, but I like the idea of having a full computer. Then I will be able to run whatever ad blocker I want.
My suspicion is Apple won’t enable this ad blocker feature for older devices. We’ll have to wait and see.
Newer iPads are about 16 times faster than your five year old Gen 1 model. . . and 8 times faster than your wife's gen 2. They are all 64 bit now too, compared to both of your 32 bit models.
I'd suggest selling them for what you can get for them and upgrading. Google's YouTube deliberately discontinued support for devices older than about two years old last year. They even dropped support for my 3rd generation Apple TV and pulled their App. This was NOT Apple's choice, but a decision made by Google. I have heard you can still look at YouTubes on the web using HTML5, though, but I cannot testify to that of my own experience having taken my own advice and upgraded. My girlfriend's 2nd Gen iPad works fine just as your wife's does. . . but with Google's attitude, who knows how long that will continue.