OkCupid Offers Firefox Visitors Links To Alternate Browsers To Protest New Mozilla CEO

Online dating site OkCupid is presenting Firefox visitors with something other than the standard home page you’d normally encounter – instead, there’s a lengthy message apologizing for the interruption and explaining that OkCupid opposes the political views of Mozilla’s new CEO Brendan Eich, who made donations to a campaign in support of California’s anti-LGBT Proposition 8 campaign.

Eich is the inventor of JavaScript, but the donation in 2008 has resulted in a fairly widespread call for his removal as CEO of Mozilla, even from voices within the company speaking out on Twitter. OkCupid says in its statement that while they wouldn’t normally venture into politics, and they essentially admit that there are bigger fish to fry, they still take particular issue in this case and felt the need to speak up. Specifically, they say equal marriage rights for same-sex couples are an issue because around 8 percent of all relationships begun on their platform would be illegal without it.

They offer a pass-through link if you still want to continue to your destination, as well as redirect links first for the other major browsers including Chrome, IE, Opera and Safari. There’s also a brief paragraph of relative background information, which includes why not only the 2008 donation, but also Eich’s public statements since then led OkCupid to believe he maintains his anti-LGBT views.

A Mozilla spokesperson issued the following statement to TechCrunch: “Mozilla supports equality for all, including marriage equality for LGBT couples. No matter who you are or who you love, everyone deserves the same rights and to be treated equally. OkCupid never reached out to us to let us know of their intentions, nor to confirm facts.” The company also pointed us to a weekend blog post expressing its support of marriage equality.

Here is the full text of OkCupid’s explanation:

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.

Politics is normally not the business of a website, and we all know there’s a lot more wrong with the world than misguided CEOs. So you might wonder why we’re asserting ourselves today. This is why: we’ve devoted the last ten years to bringing people—all people—together. 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. But it’s professionally important to the entire company. OkCupid is for creating love. Those who seek to deny love and instead enforce misery, shame, and frustration are our enemies, and we wish them nothing but failure.

If you want to keep using Firefox, the link at the bottom will take you through to the site.

However, we urge you to consider different software for accessing OkCupid:

Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari

Thank you,
OkCupid