the thing is, port forwarding works for a specific port, whereas socksproxy is a general tunnel. if you point firefox to use a remote ssh host as socks proxy t

the thing is, port forwarding works for a specific port, whereas socksproxy is a general tunnel. if you point firefox to use a remote ssh host as socks proxy then you can browse internet as if you were in the ssh host subnet. it's basically a poor man's vpn, but if all you do is www browsing it works perfectly.