According to a bug report filed against Mozilla's web application Marketplace on the company's bug tracker, the software will not support Linux at launch. The same bug report is being used by contributors to work on the problem and a first patch has also been submitted.

In a related mailing list thread, Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's head of Firefox development, expressed his frustration with the situation, saying that Mozilla did not have enough Linux developers available to get the platform integration work done. "I don't know who those people are", said Dotzler.

Mozilla CTO and JavaScript inventor Brendan Eich entered the discussion with another perspective on the situation, saying that a Linux implementation was definitely planned and pointing to the fact that the bug was open and being worked on. According to Eich, the planned web app delivery system is "too large to do at one step, or even with platform parity at the first step." He insisted that Mozilla would not give up its cross-platform commitments because of this, however.

The Mozilla Marketplace was announced back in February and is aimed at delivering web-based applications that install and behave similarly to native software on user's computers and mobile devices. It is currently not known when the Marketplace will launch but Mozilla is planning a public release "later this year".

(fab)