Proponents of same-sex marriage have taken up arms against Mozilla for promoting co-founder Brendan Eich as the company's CEO last week. Eich reportedly supported an anti-gay proposition half a decade ago.
"In 2008, Eich gave $1,000 to the campaignot to pass California's Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment that outlawed same-sex marriages in California until the U.S. Supreme Court left in place a lower-court ruling striking it down," NY Daily News reported. The contribution was made public two years ago when Eich was the Chief Technology Officer.
This time around, the loudest voices of protest are from OkCupid which on Monday blocked Firefox users from accessing the website. Inquisitr reported that OkCupid is one of the most visited sites.
"When Firefox users navigated to OKCupid looking for their next date, instead they found themselves faced with a message from the company telling them to use a different web browser, such as Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari or Microsoft's Internet Explorer," Inquisitr said.
NY Daily News quoted OkCupid's President Christian Rudder saying 12 percent of the 3 billion monthly site views for OkCupid are through Firefox.
He said, "We don't think this was the right thing for people to donate money to, and this is someone we do business with so we decided to take action."
Eich's colleagues in the past week have also taken their ire against his anti-gay stance. "I'm an employee of mozilla and cannot reconcile having @BrendanEich as CEO," a Twitter post quoted by the Independent reads.
Eich sought to control the crisis through a blog post in which he said Mozilla would always remain open to all regardless of gender, identity, race and sexual orientation. Inquisitr reported Eich's post did not cut it.
According to the Independent, Brendan Eich is also credited with the invention of JavaScript.
