Brendan Eich resigns as Mozilla CEO after anti

David Maung/Bloomberg

A newly promoted tech CEO who contributed money to an effort to ban gay marriage in California resigned Thursday, days after dating site OkCupid.com outed him as 'an opponent of equal rights.'

Brendan Eich, a co-founder of Mozilla, was named CEO of the company last month, sparking outrage among board members of the nonprofit, which makes the Firefox Internet browser, as well as users of the free service.

OkCupid prevented web surfers from logging onto the site through the Firefox portal, claiming 8% of its users are gay or lesbian.

Eich gave $1,000 to support California's Proposition 8 in 2008, a bill banning gay marriage the country's most populous state.

Prop 8 passed, but was later overturned.

Angel Navarrete/Bloomberg

Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech,' Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker wrote in a blog post Thursday announcing the move. 'Equality is necessary for meaningful speech. And you need free speech to fight for equality. Figuring out how to stand for both at the same time can be hard.'

Eich's support of the ban was made public two years ago when he served as the company chief technology officer. But the promotion late last month led half of the Mozilla Foundation's board members to quit and angered thousands of employees and people in Silicon Valley's Mountain View community, many of whom weighed in on social media.

Visitors to OkCupid using Firefox earlier this week came upon a message that described Eich as anti-gay marriage and state 'we would prefer that our users not use Mozilla software to access OkCupid.'

The company said 12% of OkCupid's 3 billion monthly page views are accessed through Firefox.

Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Eich, thought, appeared unbowed by the pressure, telling The Guardian during an interview as recently as Wednesday, the day before his announced resignation, that he doesn't believe his 'personal beliefs' are relevant to his job.

'I think I'm the best person for the job and I'm doing the job,' he told the newspaper.

Baker, in her blog post, didn't name an immediate successor for his position. She did emphasize the company supports 'the open Web' and screwed up 'because we haven't stayed true to ourselves.'

'While painful, the events of the last week show exactly why we need the web. So all of us can engage freely in the tough conversations we need to make the world better,' she wrote. 'We need to put our focus back on protecting that Web. And doing so in a way that will make you proud to support Mozilla.'

With News Wire Services

sgoldstein@nydailynews.com