[euroderf]

Well of course there's a difference between a "freeze dried" tab and an entry in the browser's history. The latter is just one line in an undifferentiated m(a|e)ss. The former is right in front of your face, one click away, maybe with an icon in view.

[CRConrad]

No. If you have 500 tabs open in any program, chances are the one you're interested in is not in view right in front of you just a single click away. There's, at a guess, a 95 percent chance[1] you'll have to scroll around and look for it. And if you're going to have to do that anyway, you can just as well do it in the browser history as among open tabs.

___

1: It's probably not exactly the same in Safari / iOS, but gotta be the same ballpark: In Firefox / Android I can see fewer than ten tabs at a time. (Hm, that number must have shrunk in a recent update.)