I think the Google toolbar is a little better in that you can see when a popup is blocked and it's easier to temporarily disable.

Mozilla Firebird puts an indicator in the status bar when it has blocked a popup, and clicking it allows you to add the site to a "popup whitelist".

I have no use for most of what is in the full blown Mozilla suite, so Firebird is a great alternative. It's also pretty quick, and at times beats IE on my system to doing something. (For example, IE just paused 20 seconds for an unknown reason trying to pull down the URL bar.)