ok, this took me sometime to do but I finally managed to get fennec/firefox to use the socks proxy.

I'm not sure if I did anything special, but I was able to change the SOCKS port in about:config, once you highlight the option then press enter on the physical keyboard, it gives a window that doesn't seem to allow for any editing.

what I did was this : after pressing the enter button on the "network.socks.port" line in about:config, I "Did Not" click on the screen at all, I simply held down the right arrow on the keyboard to make sure I reached the end of the field, then pressed "backspace" a couple of times, and finally entered the new port (9966 in my case) and clicked the physical "enter" button on the keyboard to finish and it worked, this trick also works for the "network.proxy.type" which needs to be changed to "1", it's set to "5" originally.

on another matter,I've been trying to use tsocks, and my edited tsocks.conf file has the following entries :

local = 192.168.1.0/255.255.255.0

#default server
server = 212.117.160.44

Server_type = 5

Server_port = 9966 (the port I want to tunnel through)

now I'm confused : do I start the ssh tunnel from a terminal window (ssh -D...etc) then run "tsocks fennec" from another terminal ? or do I simply use the "tsocks fennec" command and it will be enough, and do I need to add a username for the server in the tsocks.conf file ?

any help would be appreciated, like I said I can use firefox by changing the settings in the about:config but I'd like to be able to use tsocks for other apps.