I've used this: http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/archives/parseuri
URI Parser in the past and find it simple to use and it doesn't rely on any other libraries. Its also pretty lightweight.
The author has a demo page but doesn't really explain how to use it..
Its really simple, you just do something like this:
var url = "http://my-site.com:8081/index.html?query=go&page=2";
var parsed = parseUri(url);
From there you can get things like the host/protocol/port/etc..
When dealing with the querystring you do
var page = parsed.queryKey.page;
alert(page); //alerts 2
Click the parse button on the demo page to see all properties of the parsed URI object that you can access..