Am in a bit of a dilemma here and would appreciate if anyone can help out.

I am having issues connecting to internet due to the fact that most 3rd party internet aware applications on the N900 (mauku, gpodder, etc) dont respect the systemwide proxy settings in my wireless profile.
I was trying to see how I can walk round the issue, and I added export_http to /etc/profile which seems to work, and I was able to use gpodder and mauku without issues. But I was unable to use the browser because it kept timing out until i commented
out the http_proxy in /etc/profile ..
Now gpodder and mauku no longer work

Unlike symbian and even kde and gnome desktop The 3rd party applications on the N900 dont respect sysemwide proxy. Its either the developers have not programmed the applications to use proxies or the maemoOS does not announce the systemwide proxy to 3rd party apps. I will appreciate if anyone can give me pointers on how i can get round this dilemma

can anyone please enlighting me on how i can tell the browser not to ignore /etc/profile, so i can use 3rd party apps and the web browser at the same time, when i add export http_proxy to /etc/profile ?

So after search the web and mameo irc and not finding a solution I decided to file a bug against MicroB https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7235 as it turns out, it was a bug and one way to get round the problem was to use proxy ip instead of the hostname in /etc/proxy.

/etc/proxy? Do you mean /etc/profile? I'm assuming you do, but when I put my proxy settings in that file, it makes no difference to the browser. I look in the about:config for network.proxy and it hasn't set anything (I'm using ip addresses).

Any further clues?