I use both Mozilla and the google bar with IE, and both solutions work very well. One thing I like about the google bar is that it tells you when it's blocking a pop-up and also that your can on a per-site-visit basis re-enable them which is useful for the occasional site that uses popups legitimately.

It's all Javascript's fault.

No, don't blame a tool. It's the arseholes that write the scripts. Period.
Without javascript they'd just revert to doing strange things with META REFRESH tags.