14 DAY TRIAL // The fact that the new Mozilla CEO once made a donation to maintain the ban on same sex marriage in California is really coming back to hurt the company. After several members of the company’s board resigned following his appointment and employees protested his promotion, OkCupid is taking a stance as well.
The famous dating site is now displaying an interesting message to all visitors that use Firefox to browse, trying to redirect everyone to other browsers.
“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,” the message begins.
The site owners then explain that while politics is not normally the business of a website, this time it had to be an exception. Since they’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people together, they don’t believe that the position of Mozilla’s CEO is the right one.
“If individuals like Mr. Eich had their way, then roughly 8% of the relationships we’ve worked so hard to bring about would be illegal. Equality for gay relationships is personally important to many of us here at OkCupid,” the site writes.
The company is then urging people to consider using Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Opera. If you still want to use Firefox while browsing the site, that’s fine too, and there’s a link at the bottom of the page leading people to the usual homepage.
To further explain their efforts, people over at OkCupid have also added some background information about Brendan Eich and Mozilla, including his donation of $1,000 to support the passage of California’s Prop 8, a statewide initiative to ban marriage between people with the same gender. The contribution was made some six years ago and even OkCupid admits that people can change in this time.
“But Mr. Eich’s boilerplate statements in the time since make it seem like he has the same views now as he did then. Mozilla recently promoted him to CEO, hence the issue only now coming to our attention,” the message continues.
Since Eich’s donation was known to Mozilla at the time of his promotion, OkCupid wishes that Mozilla’s institutional commitment to freedom and openness to be better reflected by its choice of CEOs.
It’s unclear whether the message that appears for Firefox users will be here to stay or it will be removed after a while.