In my opinion, history access is a major advantage of Firefox over Chrome. There are many sites that I don't bother to bookmark because I know typing a substring into the location bar will bring it up as a suggestion faster than I would be able to choose it from a bookmark menu. Plus, it displays a bunch of related URLs which are surprisingly often useful.

I definitely would not want to default to disabling it. It's my browser, and letting it remember where I've been enables it to be much more useful to me.