IMO it doesn't worth the time to discuss appropriate and inappropriate uses of JavaScript. It's way simpler to disable it entirely. I use two browsers: Firefox with "YesScript" extension which keeps the black list of sites where JS is disabled: see a popup? laggy scrolling? sticky headers? Bam! hit the button and you won't see it again. For work, where web applications like Google suite matter, I use Chrome. Some tim…
Those are all really good ideas, and I've had some similar thoughts myself. But, they won't be added to Firefox unless they are first added to Chrome, and they certainly won't be added to Chrome. Firefox was I believe the first browser to include blocking of popups, and it was said to be irresponsible and harmful to advertisers. But the days of Firefox being at all disruptive are long over.
No it was Opera. Same for tabbed browsing (can you imagine not having that today? only spawning new windows?).