And when you just spent 10 minutes finding the link you need, and your browser crashes, you're going to spend a lot more time again. There are plenty of cases where I'm really glad my browser re-opens all the tabs, with cookies in play etc.
If your job includes having to use a web application for significant portions of said job, it's even more invaluable. I've worked on several applications that account for more than 40% of some employees' time per day... This was back in the IE6 days, they bemoaned having to close/reopen once a day because of memory issues (IE6 had horrible GC across COM boundaries).
TBH, I wouldn't even have thought about searching history... also, every change for every window would save history requiring a sync... And for some things, cookies, sessionStorage, localStorage, websql and the like are pretty important too.
If your job includes having to use a web application for significant portions of said job, it's even more invaluable. I've worked on several applications that account for more than 40% of some employees' time per day... This was back in the IE6 days, they bemoaned having to close/reopen once a day because of memory issues (IE6 had horrible GC across COM boundaries).