Since the announcement of Brendan Eich as Mozilla’s (News - Alert) new ceo on March 24, the company has been under great pressure to find a replacement because of a $1,000 donation Eich made to the Proposition 8 campaign in 2008. According to the Wall Street Journal, this included the resignation of valuable members of its board including Gary Kovacs (News - Alert), John Lilly and Ellen Siminoff, The company has quickly selected an interim CEO in the form of former Mozilla CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Chris Beard.

By replacing Eich with Beard, the company is putting someone in charge they are familiar with until they can find a long-term replacement. This not only removes the negative press the company has been receiving, but also allows it to move forward and focus on the business of providing an open source browser for the world, which currently is in the Firefox 29 beta release as of last month.

"In this time of transition there is no better person to lead us. Chris has one of the clearest visions of how to take the Mozilla mission and turn it into programs and activities and product ideas that I have ever seen… We will continue to bring the richness and flexibility of the Web to Firefox users and will further integrate our services offerings," Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Chairwoman.

Mr. Beard has worked for Mozilla for many years with leadership roles overseeing products, innovation and marketing as well as the launch of Firefox for Android (News - Alert) and the Firefox OS mobile operating system. According to the company, he handled the launch of Firefox 1.0 in 2004, which was the beginning of a nonprofit browser taking on the corporate giants.

Mr. Beard’s previous experiences include:

Greylock Partners – as an Executive in Residence advising the leadership teams of Greylock's consumer technology portfolio companies and evaluating new investment opportunities. Greylock has invested in companies like Linkedin, Facebook (News - Alert), Tumblr, Dropbox, Pandora, Cloudera, CreativeLive and many more.

Prior to Greylock, Chris served in key senior leadership roles at Mozilla for more than eight years, most recently as CMO.

Before Mozilla, Chris served in a variety of senior marketing and product roles at Cluster File Systems (acquired by Sun), HP and Linuxcare. He also co-founded The Puffin Group (acquired by Linuxcare), an open source technology company, where he served as CEO.

Mr. Beard attended the University of Edinburgh where he received an MBA in International Business and was awarded the University of Edinburgh's John McFarlane Prize for Leadership. Additionally he went to the ESADE Business School and the University of Ottawa for Biochemistry and Economics.