From the weekend desk, two items announced late Friday afternoon we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you about.

First, Google is officially dropping support for IE6. Come March 1st, the company is also going to start phasing out support for other older browsers from Apple, Mozilla and Google itself, but IE6 is the one everyone’s most happy to see gone. The notoriously buggy browser is still supported by some institutions and large organizations. The new minimum browser requirements in Google Apps will be Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0 and Safari 3.0.

Second, Mozilla has launched Firefox for mobiles running Nokia’s Maemo operating system. This is the first official 1.0 version of Mobile Firefox, and the first mobile browser ever to support add-ons. We took it for a test drive when it was still in beta and found it to be quite slick.

Django, the popular web development framework written in Python, has released the first alpha for its much-anticipated new version, Django 1.2.

Among the new features coming in Django 1.2 are support for multiple databases — a key feature for larger websites running Django — improved security features and a messaging framework that works much like Ruby on Rail’s “flash” feature.

The multiple database support will likely be the most important part of the next version of Django since it will allow for much easier application scaling. Django 1.2 makes it easy to target individual databases within your apps using some new queryset methods which make it easy to read and write to specific databases.

The security features include much-improved protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. For more details on how the CSRF protection works, have a look at the new CSRF documentation page.

If you’d like to test out Django 1.2, or see how your apps run on the new release, head over to the downloads page or update your Subversion checkout. Keep in mind though that this is still an alpha release and should not be used on production sites. The final release of Django 1.2 is scheduled to arrive in March 2010.

See Also:

• Flush With Choices, Developers Still Dig Django the Most
• Latest Django Beta Sets the Stage for 1.0 Release
• Get Started With Django

Even with all the support OpenID enjoys within the tech industry, it’s no secret that the identity management technology still confuses the hell out of most web users.

One of OpenID’s biggest proponents thinks part of the problem lies in the name.

Identity guru and noted open source advocate Chris Messina breaks it down in a post on his Factory City blog, where he lays out his ideas for making OpenID “both easier and sexier” for the general web audience.

Consider OpenID in the shadow of Facebook Connect, its far more successful competitor based on Facebook’s proprietary platform. Forget that Facebook is much more widely known than OpenID — the real problem is that Facebook Connect is attached to an actual thing you can log in to, a website you can visit, a company you’ve heard of.

OpenID, on the other hand, is more nebulous. Your identity… on the web… portable… everywhere… what?

Everyone knows what Facebook is, so add “Connect” to the familiar Facebook logo and most people can work out what’s probably going to happen — the site you’re using is going to connect to your Facebook account, and some information about you and your friends will be shared between the two.

OpenID lacks the brand recognition of Facebook, not just because of Facebook’s fame, but because Facebook is a website and OpenID is an abstraction.

Messina suggests adding “Connect” to OpenID so that it mirrors Facebook Connect, Twitter Connect and other sign-in systems might help. And Messina’s rebranding — the snazzy black button above — is certainly a step up from OpenID’s current logo and branding.

As for the “connect” aspect, Messina gives a layman’s definition of OpenID as “a technology that lets you use an account that you already have to sign up, sign in, and bring your profile, contacts, data, and activities with you to any compatible site on the web.”

In order to do that, however, Messina is proposing more than just a name change. He’s suggesting that OpenID be repackaged as a profile of the OAuth WRAP protocol. The idea is that OAuth WRAP could handle the actual connections between the websites sharing data and OpenID would then offer a standardized way to pass along profile data, relationships, access controls, and activities (what you’ve “liked,” “loved,” “favorited,” etc.).

So, how would that simplify OpenID for new users? For one, it would help solve the “NASCAR problem” — current implementations of OpenID often display a half-dozen or so sign-in options, and the effect is similar to the garish mish-mash of ads covering NASCAR vehicles. It’s visually and psychologically confounding.

Messina’s design would mean that, instead of an assortment of rainbow-colored logos from Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and other OpenID providers, there would simply be the singular black button above. He admits that after you click the shiny black button, the NASCAR problem might still be there on the next step — at least for now — though he does promise some additional screenshot mockups and suggests that “the browser could handle this at an earlier stage.”

See Also:

• OpenID: Over One Billion (Potentially) Served
• Facebook Announces Support for OpenID Logins
• OpenID Is Here. Too Bad Users Can’t Figure Out How It Works

Mozilla Labs has announced the release of JetPack 0.7 an update to the new, simpler way of extending Firefox using common web development tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Eventually Mozilla plans to incorporate JetPack into a future Firefox release, but at the moment interested developers can grab the JetPack add-on which allows JetPack to work within current version of Firefox. Yes, for now JetPack is an add-on to install add-ons.

JetPack is designed to make it easy for anyone with basic web developer skills to build Firefox extensions. While JetPack was innovative when Mozilla first announced it, in the time since Google’s Chrome browser has added an extension system which works on the same principles as JetPack — using web-based tools like HTML and CSS. It would be nice if Chrome extensions would work with JetPack and vice versa, but differences between the underlying browsers mean that such compatibility is unlikely.

Jetpack is still an experimental Labs project, but the 0.7 release sees JetPack moving closer to a stable project. Among the new features in this release are a unified first-run API that explains JetPack for new users, as well as some improvements to UI elements like status bar widgets. The latest version also restores the debugging features available through Firebug.

There are also quite a few more working JetPack extensions available than last time we checked in with JetPack, including a very handy tool for web developers, CSS Refresh, which can refresh the CSS on a page without reloading the whole page.

See Also:

• Jetpack Add-ons for Firefox Get Closer to Blast Off
• Firefox Add-ons Blast Off With ‘JetPack’
• Firefox 3.6 Nearly Complete, Fifth Beta Available Now