A great timeline control that I have been using recently is the CHAP Almende Timeline. It is simple on the surface and to use, but offers plenty of customisability. Seems fairly lightweight, and is able to handle large amounts of events on most browsers (for some reason some browsers choke a bit on large data sets when you zoom out too far). This works quite nicely on tablet touch screens too, if that is useful to you.
CHAP Almende timeline is also regularly updated by Jos de Jong at https://github.com/almende/chap-links-library and he is pretty quick to address any issues.
