Brendan Eich Flickr/Strandell Mozilla's CEO Brendan Eich is out.

Eich is resigning as CEO and leaving the board of Mozilla, the open-source computing company that makes the Firefox browser.

He had been under fire for supporting anti-gay marriage legislation in California in 2008.

Some Mozilla employees had been calling for his resignation on Twitter for the past week.

Dating site OkCupid changed its home page so that if someone using Firefox came to it, it would tell them about Eich and suggest they switch browsers.

In a blog post Mozilla said: "Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves."

Eich co-founded Mozilla in 1998 and was previously the company's CTO. He invented the programming language JavaScript.

"Brendan Eich is a good friend of 20 years, and has made a profound contribution to the web and to the entire world," said venture capitalist Marc Andreessen on Twitter in reaction to the news.

In recent interviews, Eich sounded defiant and unlikely to resign. It looks as if the pressure was too much and he decided that for the good of the company he would leave.

Eich's problems at Mozilla might have been bigger than just his support for anti-gay marriage legislation.

The Wall Street Journal reported that three board members — ex-Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, ex-Mozilla CEO John Lilly, and Ellen Siminoff, CEO of online education startup Shmoop — left Mozilla's board because they wanted an outsider to run the company.

A Mozilla spokesperson had this to say about the board members leaving, "The three board members ended their terms before Brendan was publicly announced as CEO for a variety of reasons. Two had been planning to leave for some time, one since January and one explicitly at the end of the CEO search, regardless of the person selected."

Lilly also took to Twitter to weigh in: "I don't really know of any other organization that would write something quite like that [blog post on the CEO leaving], and so I'm very hopeful from here about Mozilla."

Kara Swisher at Re/code had the news first. Mozilla confirmed it in a blog post.

Here's the post:

Mozilla prides itself on being held to a different standard and, this past week, we didn’t live up to it. We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves.

We didn’t act like you’d expect Mozilla to act. We didn’t move fast enough to engage with people once the controversy started. We’re sorry. We must do better.

Brendan Eich has chosen to step down from his role as CEO. He’s made this decision for Mozilla and our community.

Mozilla believes both in equality and freedom of speech. 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.

Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. We welcome contributions from everyone regardless of age, culture, ethnicity, gender, gender-identity, language, race, sexual orientation, geographical location and religious views. Mozilla supports equality for all.

We have employees with a wide diversity of views. Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions in public. This is meant to distinguish Mozilla from most organizations and hold us to a higher standard. But this time we failed to listen, to engage, and to be guided by our community.

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.

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.

What’s next for Mozilla’s leadership is still being discussed. We want to be open about where we are in deciding the future of the organization and will have more information next week. However, our mission will always be to make the Web more open so that humanity is stronger, more inclusive and more just: that’s what it means to protect the open Web.

We will emerge from this with a renewed understanding and humility — our large, global, and diverse community is what makes Mozilla special, and what will help us fulfill our mission. We are stronger with you involved.

Thank you for sticking with us.

Mitchell Baker, Executive Chairwoman