I guess that is a bug in iceweasel wrt. the default parameters.
Anyway, you should use epiphany instead, which doesn't have this issue
in etch :)
It's not just etch - this happens on lenny/sid as well.
I guess I should file a bug on this - it appears to be fixed in Ubuntu, so maybe there's a patch there that could be used.
Regarding drivers, I know there are source packages in non-free (and main, for some free but out-of-tree drivers) and the module-assistant will build these. I was just suggesting a more GUI-oriented approach (like Ubuntu Restricted Manager) - though non-free drivers would ONLY be displayed when non-free is in
sources.list.
Regarding frequency scaling - it didn't work for me (I had to manually enable it, though I didn't need a custom kernel or anything like that). I'll investigate further and possibly file a bug.