Back in the Summer of 2011, two engineers at Mozilla had just finished making a complete rendering engine for PDF files using JavaScript and HTML5 (https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/). Emboldened by this success, the question they kept asking themselves was "is there anything JavaScript can't do?" Somehow, the idea of building an entire phone operating in JavaScript got in their heads. So they decided to investigate how technically possible it was, and thus Boot to Gecko (later Firefox OS) was born.

In this talk, I want to shed some light on the how Firefox OS came about, and how it developed over the last 5 years at Mozilla. This is not really a talk about the UX, or content design, or the marketing of Firefox OS, but rather about Mozilla's journey through the mobile OS landscape. I also hope to leave some time at the end to answer any questions people may have.