Dynamic Framerates = Safari Trouble

[erik leeman]

So I tried to be clever making a preloader that has a 'resting' framerate of 5 fps and a 'working' framerate of 50 (the framerate I set for my Pano2VR Flash panos).
My reason for wanting this mechanism is this (test)page:
http://tinyurl.com/Direct-to-FullscreenPano
Obviously a HTML page so full of ready and active Flash files is less of a CPU load if they all cycle at a lowly idle rate of 5 fps than if all at full throttle at 50 I thought.

And it works splendidly too in all Windows (XP) browsers, except for ... Apple's Safari (v4.0.4) AAAAAAARGHHH!!!!
Safari just freezes the entire screen at the instant the frame rate changes, even the [Esc] button doesn't work anymore.
The only thing you can do then is kill its process in Task Manager, what a bummer!

Lesson learned: don't do dynamic framerate changes in Flash/AS3, or Safari (for Windows) will bite you!

Erik

ps: the preloader I was testing this with is the one named 'El carro del Aurora'.
It reads its thumbnail, loading image, and pano URLs from an external XML file, making the preloader itself not only small (24 kBytes in size), but also very flexible!
However it still needs some improvement when it come to timing, because online the loading image is too late to appear almost every time : (