By “desktop-grade” I mean scale and control, not a different engine.

On iPadOS everything uses WebKit, so yes, Beam is Safari/WebKit under the hood.

The difference is tab management. Tabs have explicit states (active, warm, suspended), so inactive tabs are unloaded to save memory while keeping their navigation state. That makes large tab sets usable without killing performance.

You get a persistent sidebar, vertical tabs, spaces, pinned tabs, and complete keyboard shortcuts - things common on desktop browsers but mostly missing on iPad.

If you take Arc for example, the only Arc app on iPad is Arc Search, which is just the iPhone app stretched for iPad. Therefore, it's optimised for quick, on-the-go searches rather than the kind of workflow you would have on a Mac. This works for some kinds of users, sure, but I personally am trying to be able to switch to use my iPad as a laptop when I'm travelling or something, and I really miss having any sort of browser anywhere like what we have on desktop - Zen / Arc / even SigmaOS or any other browser with a sidebar.

That's what I mean by desktop-grade - does that make sense? Sorry if it was confusing!