Are you in the market for a little bit of action from a stranger on the Internet and also a user of Firefox? You might be in for a little bit of a surprise. Online dating cesspool OkCupid, home to the weird, wonderful, and relentlessly creepy depths of human interaction, has taken a very vivid stand against Mozilla Firefox and, in particular, its newly installed CEO Brendan Eich.
Firefox users who access the site are first greeted with a message that begins “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 problem here is that Eich was recently been found to have donated to a campaign in support of California’s fiercely controversial Proposition 8 – a publicly voted legal amendment that attempted to remove the rights of same-sex couples to marry; a ruling that has since been scrapped by the Supreme Court.
Eich’s appointment in and of itself has been controversial enough, with one board member resigning over the decision. Eich has been with Mozilla since the company was founded in the 1990s as an off-shoot of Netscape. But this is the first website to speak out against the appointment, effectively boycotting the software by using the browser’s ID tags to re-direct users to the message as they attempt to access the website. The message does allow people to consciously access OkCupid through Firefox, but it encourages users to think about switching browser software instead.
So kids, if you’re thinking about rating that special someone 5 stars, or sending that cutie patootie a well thought out, meticulously drafted message that reads “Sup?” maybe you should think about doing it through Chrome or Safari instead. They also, begrudgingly, ask you think about using “Internet Exploder” too. But chances are if you’re using IE and OKC at the same time, you’re probably better off heading out to an Over 28s night instead.
