Works like an absolute champ with Fedora 18 64bit + nvdia + chrome 30
Worked fine on Windows Vista, on a Lenovo T61, while watching VOD in a different tab.
Oddly: worked fine on my mac pro 1.1 (2006) and 10.6 (snow leopard) and firefox.
Works great on my mid-2010 iMac with OS X 10.9 and Chrome 30.
Works fine on my MBP, on latest Safari/Mavericks.
The beautiful wonder that is Javascript. All the majesty of a killer whale piloting a single-engine supercruiser via a blue-tooth repeater connected 500m gallon tank in the Sahara. Think about how flexible such a system can be!
Considering that it's WebGL, pretty sure it's that age-old spectre: graphics drivers.
Oh, Definitely! It couldn't be the layers of parsers, spaghetti Javascript libraries, web protocols, the DOM, WebGL itself which is a part of Javascript, or a million other crufty web things, it has to be the microsecond latency introduced by hardware-level API abstraction...
User-level libraries can't lock up your OS unless they can trigger kernel / driver bugs or make your hardware malfunction. In this case, graphics drivers are the most likely cause.
In theory they can't in practice, you just saw it happen. malfunction is a human concept, perhaps the hardware is behaving exactly as intended.