With that you have to follow the footnote, read the short form of the reference and then manually find the long form. With only a few references, it's not too bad, but that system certainly doesn't scale to pages with dozens of references.
You make it sound almost as difficult as turning to the bibliography pages of a printed book.
That's one step, from the body of the text to the reference. This is two - from the body of the text to the footnote and from there to the reference.