There is a follow-on to this story talking about later successor projects built on the codebase, which have shipped 10x more devices.

https://medium.com/@bfrancis/the-legacy-of-firefox-os-c58ec3...

I posted it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41357491

> So I’d like to tell you my version of the story of Firefox OS, from the birth of the Boot to Gecko open source software project as a mailing list post and an empty GitHub repository in 2011

It started earlier - XPud is non mentioned (!) 2008 cool LiveUSB Linux distro booting in seconds directly to the Firefox browser XUL !

http://penkia.blogspot.com/2009/12/xpud-092-firefox-os-with-... (2009 Firefox OS with App Store )

http://penkia.blogspot.com/2008/06/xpud-firefox-liveusb.html (2008 xPUD 0.1)

http://penkia.blogspot.com/2009/06/reviews-of-xpud-09.html (2009)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=551496 (50 mb Linux livecd distro with a XUL interface and 10 second boot)