Benefits of the history panel

The first thing to notice is that the items in the history panel are "first-class citizens", i.e. they can be completely manipulated. For example, you can delete a file you see in the history panel without first opening its containing directory.

But the most important feature of the history panel is its capability to show the recent directories, because this enables faster navigation, while leaving the taskbar uncluttered. Let me explain this in detail. When you work, you usually move continuously among a bunch of directories (which are "important" in the current situation). To improve navigation speed between those directories, you usually leave many file manager windows open, each in one directory. Unfortunately, this has some serious drawbacks:

Many open browser windows clutter the taskbar. The taskbar is not meant to contain many windows. A cluttered taskbar makes it very expensive to switch tasks.
it is not easy to switch to a window you just visited. In particular, it is very difficult to continuously switch between two directories. This is a consequence of the taskbar having a static sorting.

To solve this problem, web browsers introduced "tabbed browsing". Unfortunately, tabbed browsing only solves the first problem, whereas OneFinger's history panel solves both. The panel contains a history of directories which:

allows the taskbar to remain uncluttered (because the history is separate from the taskbar).
makes you quickly reach an important directory (because you see it in the history at any time).
makes it easy to toggle between two (or more) directories (because the history is sorted by recent usage, so the two directories are always on top of the history).