Last week should have been a good week for Brendan Eich. Eich was tapped to become the new CEO of Mozilla, the nonprofit maker of the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client that he co-founded. However, Eich’s promotion was met with a rapid backlash due to the fact that he donated $1,000 to the effort to pass Proposition 8 in California, the ballot initiative that temporarily stripped same sex couples of the right to marry.
Since this has become widely known, it has sparked a huge amount of Twitter outrage, it has prompted three of the six Mozilla board members to resign, and it has led to numerous current and past Mozilla employees calling on Eich to resign. However, the trouble isn’t only happening within the corporation. The online dating site OkCupid has placed a new landing page on their site for anyone navigating to OkCupid from a Firefox Browser. The site, which gets approximately 8 percent of its audience from the LGBT community, now features this message “Hello there, Mozilla Firefox user. Pardon this interruption of your OkCupid experience. Mozilla’s new CEO, Brendan Eich, is an opponent of equal rights for gay couples. We would therefore prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.”
If users still want to use the site with Firefox, there is a link available, but the page also directs users to the download sites for other browsers including Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.
While Eich issued a bland statement of regret for the trouble that has arisen and offered a blanket statement about Mozilla’s commitment to equality, he has taken no public steps to address the current situation or redress his past anti-LGBT actions. As such, for the time being, it seems like Mozilla’s fox is in the doghouse.
